The Daily Heller: A Poster Museum Where Movies Began, in New Jersey

by Steven Heller PostedMarch 14, 2024

During the period just before and after the first World War, Fort Lee, NJ, served as an incubator, home to the first concentration of motion picture studios in the United States. While the stars and studios eventually went West, Fort Lee is where the movies outgrew their roots and emerged as both an art and an industry.

The nonprofit Barrymore Film Center and Museum—the final commission of architect and theater designer Hugh Hardy—opened in Fort Lee in October 2022. Part of the center’s offerings is a special museum devoted, in part, to film posters. I asked the curator of exhibitions, Richard Koszarski, to shine the spotlight on his contribution to preserving and displaying the printed artifacts of the movie world—arguably America’s most beloved industry.

Does much or any of the museum’s collection come from Fort Lee itself?
The Barrymore Film Center essentially functions as a local history museum whose subject is not, say, immigration or the Civil War, but the growth and development of moving pictures. Like other museums and historical sites, it uses its history to look forward, to link the past with the present through such activities as film screenings, museum exhibitions, publications and public events.

What is your curatorial goal?
Local residents began working to preserve this history as far back as the 1930s, work that was later taken on by the Fort Lee Public Library and Fort Lee Historical Society. I started here in 2000, when the Fort Lee Film Commission was formed to focus on that part of this local history (Fort Lee’s role in the American Revolution was already well-handled elsewhere). At the time I was professor of English and cinema studies at Rutgers University; prior to that I had been associated with the development of the Museum of the Moving Image since 1977, eventually serving as head of collections and exhibitions. My main area of interest is the history of the East Coast motion picture industry, which I explored in books like Fort Lee, the Film Town (2004) and Hollywood on the Hudson (2008).

Is there a criteria for collecting and displaying posters in the Barrymore Film Center?
Hugh Hardy had originally been hired to design a theater space, but as work progressed this vision expanded and what was once a modest lobby display grew into an 1800 square foot exhibition gallery. To date we have designed and installed three exhibits in our museum, each of which manages to celebrate Fort Lee’s (often neglected!) role in a different chapter of American film history. While some materials are drawn from our own collections, most items on exhibit are on loan from a range of public and private collections. We have used the same local design team, E. K. Skrabonja Exhibition Design, for all our exhibitions.

What is the intent or message of your exhibitions?
The inaugural exhibit looked at three members of the Barrymore family, John, Ethel and Lionel, representatives of an acting dynasty whose careers reflect the history of American entertainment, from vaudeville to video. Not only did all of them make films in Fort Lee, but some of the family even lived there. Power Couple looked at the rise of media celebrity through the careers of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, famed as the king and queen of Hollywood, but also veterans of the Fort Lee studios (and in Mary’s case, dozens of short films shot on its streets in nickelodeon days). 

We have just installed our third exhibit, Coming Attractions: Classic Film Posters from the Konstantino Spanoudis iKon Collection (April 7–Jan. 5). The 70 items on display date from 1910 through 1981, mainly American, but with a few European examples included for context. The focus here is not on the making of films, but the ways in which they were sold and marketed—specifically, on how producers and distributors, as early as 1910, used posters as their major advertising vehicle. Beyond this, the afterlife of such posters has a story all its own.

From a curatorial viewpoint, how do you explain the primary purpose of film posters as functional and collectable?
Film posters arrived at an unfortunate moment, appearing in quantity just as “postermania” seemed to have run its course. Neil Harris noted in 1998 that, “by 1910 or so the poster as a collectible had all but vanished.” Even those still committed to the form considered film posters of little or no interest. Charles Matlack Price ignored film posters entirely in his 1913 study of Posters, and while acknowledging their numbers in the updated 1922 edition (now dubbed Poster Design) wrote that the number of good film posters was still “deplorably small.” Even in the 1920s and ’30s, as other poster genres flourished and once again attracted both curators and collectors, movie posters were still regarded as anonymous hack work (one reason being that, in America at least, nearly all film posters were, in fact, anonymous). As late as 1968, the published catalog of the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal Word and Image exhibition included no American film posters.

How is the scope of your collection addressing graphic design?
When a significant market for film posters began to develop in the 1970s, it was initially driven by collectors hunting for movie memorabilia. Galleries and major auction sales devoted solely to film posters appeared only later, fueling an appreciation for the history, culture and range of graphic traditions involved in this specific poster genre. But until then individual collectors were very much on their own, and the collections they assembled often had little in common with institutional holdings.

Konstantino Spanoudis was one of those collectors. Spanoudis loved movies, but unlike many others he was not just collecting souvenirs of his favorite films. Graphic design was always the major consideration, often trumping a film’s critical standing or historical importance. A passionate collector, he first found himself attracted by the size and color of the large stone lithographs printed to advertise B-westerns and short comedies in the 1930s, but was soon collecting European posters, classic Hollywood, and the work of Saul Bass. These and other collecting categories ring the walls of the gallery, while the spine of the exhibit is devoted entirely to posters from the golden age of Fort Lee film production, when John Barrymore and Theda Bara were making movies just down the street.

When the Hollywood studio system still dominated the industry, the useful life of a movie poster could be measured in days. Films rarely played any single location longer than a week, and the poster for last week’s film was useless, quickly replaced by the next new thing. Thousands were printed, very few survived. Some studios did manage to save many of their films, but none of them bothered to save the advertising. The posters preserved in Coming Attractions exist today only because collectors like Spanoudis simply fell in love with their graphics.

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This Hollywood Power Couple Got Their Start in Fort Lee

Jim Beckerman - NorthJersey.com - Published 10:03pm 6/6/23

Is it love that makes the world go round? Or is it money? Either way, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Hollywood superstars who were also shrewd producers and devoted soul mates, set it spinning.

They were the first of that now-familiar species: the Power Couple.

Before Ben Affleck and J-Lo, before Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Doug and Mary were the great celebrity twosome. Their 1919 wedding was world news. Their mansion, Pickfair, was Hollywood's most sought-after invitation. And their company, United Artists, founded with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, is still around.

"Not only were they the quintessential Hollywood couple, they were also the people who are responsible, even today, for a lot of what you see on the big screen," said Nelson Page, executive director of the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee.

A new exhibit, "Power Couple, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in Hollywood," opening June 10 and running through December, will explore their lasting mystique, as well as their New Jersey roots. Both started their careers in the fledgling studios of Fort Lee.

Jersey roots of Hollywood

"Both Doug and Mary are on our Walk of Fame in front of the center," said film historian Richard Koszarski, curator of this and all Barrymore exhibits. "And both made films in Fort Lee, in slightly different periods."

Mary, discovered at age 17 by Griffith, had been brought to Bergen County to make films like "The New York Hat" (1912). Fairbanks made "His Picture in the Papers" (1916) and other films at the city's Willat-Triangle Studio. "Fairbanks made a couple of features for Triangle," said Koszarski, author of "Fort Lee: The Film Town." "This was when his career was just developing."

From these rudimentary beginnings, the exhibit takes them to their full Hollywood glory.

Over 200 items tell their tale: stills, posters, window cards, handwritten love letters, a music box that was given to Mary by Doug as a birthday present, Mary's hairbrush set and one actual sample of her famous golden curls, Doug's "Robin Hood" boots, and an assortment of practice swords used by the swashbuckling star to stay in trim for such costume epics as "The Black Pirate" and "The Three Musketeers."

The attraction will launch this week with screenings of several of their movies: "Johanna Enlists" (Pickford), June 9 at 7:30 p.m., and on the 10th, "Sparrows" (Pickford) at 2:45 p.m. and "The Thief of Bagdad" (Fairbanks) at 7 p.m.

This Arabian Nights extravaganza has spectacle and special effects that still dazzle, 90 years later. And the film, introduced Saturday by author Tracey Goessel ("The First King of Hollywood: The Life of Douglas Fairbanks"), is also notable for its sympathetic — if wildly inaccurate — take on Islamic culture, and the opportunities it gives to two great Asian actors: Sojin Kamiyama and Anna May Wong.

"It's a delight for the eye, certainly," Page said. "And there are points where you're going to look at the screen and go, how the hell did they do that in 1924?"

Two immortals

So who were Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks?

She was "America's sweetheart." Sweet, innocent, golden-haired, virginal.

He was the all-American male. Healthy, happy, virtuous, fit. Clean in mind and body.

It all sounds dire. But in fact, Doug cut his Dudley Do-Right image with wit, self-mockery, and an athletic prowess that still amazes. And "Little Mary" tempered her sugary persona with a dose of sass and spunk.

"She's a rascal," Koszarski said. "She gets into trouble all the time. She'll get in the mud, make a mess in the kitchen. She's almost like a tomboy. She's not just a character who is too pure and too sweet and too nice."

Individually, they were box-office dynamite. Together, they were the team to beat — though not on-screen. They made only one film together: 1929's "The Taming of the Shrew." It was not a success.

"Their kind of films were very different, and their personalities were very different," Koszarski said.

Driven to succeed

One thing they shared was ambition.

Mary, who had grown up poor and was the family breadwinner from an early age, was known for her hard-headedness in salary negotiations. "She had a powerful stage mother, Charlotte," Koszarski said. "Charlotte taught her to have sharp elbows. You have to take care of your own career. No one else is going to do it."

Doug had graduated from go-getting comedian to action hero in a series of lavish costume epics: "The Mark of Zorro" (1920), "The Three Musketeers" (1921), "Robin Hood" (1922), "The Thief of Bagdad" (1924), "The Black Pirate" (1926), "The Iron Mask" (1929).

These, like "Little Mary's" salary, were costly. Producers balked — as they did when other ambitious film folk, like comedian Chaplin and director Griffith, also got big ideas about how colossal their movies should be, and how much compensation they should get.

Taking charge

In 1919, these four astounded Hollywood, and the world, by announcing that they would create their own distribution company: United Artists. They would create and market their own films. And they would cut their own paychecks.

"The lunatics have taken over the asylum," one movie executive sneered. But they began a company that endures to this day. And they had taken Hollywood's first stand on behalf of its content creators. Movies were an art. Artists, not producers, should be in charge.

"They said, 'We're the guys making the movies, we have a vision we want to get across, and we want the proper financial compensation for this,' " Koszarski said. "They gambled that they had the power to separate themselves from the existing structure."

One result was that Pickford became Hollywood's first major female film executive — a woman who wielded behind-the-scenes influence long after her screen career was over.

"When she grew out of acting, she became one of the top five motion picture executives," Page said. "She was a trailblazer."

A love story

But it wasn't their business acumen, or even just their movies, that captivated the public. It was their love story. Doug and Mary, off-screen, were the toast of 1920s America — and the world.

"They were at the center of this international media whirlwind," Koszarski said. "They would go to Paris and Moscow and be treated as if the Beatles had arrived. This kind of celebrity hadn't existed previously. When people like the Prince of Wales and Albert Einstein go to California, you don't read about them dining with the governor. They dined at Pickfair."

Their love for each other was apparently very real — even though in 1936, toward the end of their film careers, it ended in divorce. Fairbanks died three years later.

"What struck me is how deep their love was for each other," Page said. "We have quite a large collection of their love letters. They're very tender. There's just this deep and abiding love. That's why it was so heartbreaking when it was over."

The New York Asian Film Festival Annouce First Highlights from the 22nd Edition

New York, NY (June 15, 2023) – On July 14, 2023, the New York Asian Film Foundation and Film at Lincoln Center will kick off the 22nd edition of the New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF), with 60+ new and classic titles, a greatly expanded selection of short films, and an exciting slate of celebrated guests from Asia and the diaspora. The festival runs from July 14–30, 2023 at Film at Lincoln Center (FLC), with a special weekend of screenings (July 21–23) at a new venue, the historic Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the birthplace of the motion picture industry in America.

“As filmmakers from Asia continue to earn the lion’s share of top awards (and attention) on the international film festival circuit, this year’s selection shows that those are still trees hiding a forest of talent,” said Samuel Jamier, executive director of NYAFF and president of the New York Asian Film Foundation. “We are thrilled to offer a platform that is ever more culturally relevant with new films from all corners of Asia. It is a year of massive expansion for us at a time when a growing number of American filmmakers of Asian descent are conquering screens and hearts. We look forward to bringing passionate stories to passionate audiences in a city that remains a global center of film culture and business!”

The NYAFF Opening Film is the North American premiere of the unique Korean genre mashup Killing Romance, directed by Lee Won-suk. The director will be joined at Film at Lincoln Center on opening night by his lead actor, Lee Sun-kyun (Parasite, A Hard Day), who turns in an unforgettable performance as the indescribably overbearing husband of a disgraced supermodel-movie star, fully armed with his history of versatile roles in everything from art-house collaborations with Hong Sang-soo to rom-coms to his SAG Award-winning turn in Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. Director Lee Won-suk has a rich history with NYAFF—his first film, How to Use Guys with Secret Tips, premiered at NYAFF 2013, and Lee won the Audience Award at NYAFF 2015 with his second feature, the big-budget period drama The Royal Tailor. It’s a thrill to welcome him back with his third feature.

This year’s Hong Kong Panorama, point of origin and DNA of the festival’s programming (NYAFF started off as a Hong Kong movie showcase), is an explosive cocktail of genre nostalgia and humanistic drama, drawing the contours of a road map for the future of the island’s cinema. A new 4K restoration of Patrick Tam’s 1982 Hong Kong New Wave watershed Nomad (Director’s Cut) enhances the film’s outré mix of romance and violence, and one of Leslie Cheung’s early great roles. Cutting-edge noir auteur Soi Cheang’s Mad Fate harkens back to the region’s time-honored legacy of crime films with a new sense of urgency and manic energy; Amos Why’s Everyphone Everywhere captures pandemic-era life in Hong Kong via the city’s reliance on cell phones like no other film, and has more to say on recent social shifts than hours of CNN commentary; The Sunny Side of the Street sees the incomparable Anthony Wong lending salty sympathy to new immigrants; and A Light Never Goes Out highlights the city’s iconic neon craftwork and all its storied achievements, offering a unique love letter to the island’s culture.

As previously announced, actor and producer Louis Koo, one of Hong Kong’s biggest stars, is to be honored with NYAFF’s Extraordinary Star Asia Award. Koo has more than 100 credits to his name, including sci-fi action thriller Warriors of Future, the highest-grossing Asian film of all time in the territory following its release last August. The award highlights his work as a producer and philanthropist, recognizing his many exceptional contributions to the Asian film industry, including the One Cool Group, now an industry powerhouse, and his support of award-winning work both in and outside Asia. Of the many Koo-starring films featured at NYAFF over the years, recent highlights include the White Storm trilogy, Paradox, A Witness Out of the Blue, All U Need Is Love, and his new lifesaving drama Vital Signs, which he will be on hand to introduce. NYAFF will also present the latest One Cool production, In Broad Daylight, a shocking exposé of abuse at a care home based on real events.

NYAFF’s China lineup showcases novel work and a filmmaker-in-focus program/tribute to entrepreneur turned director and producer Zhang Wei, who has built a unique body of cinematic work, making the naturalistic portrayals of the marginalized in China’s rapidly changing society his signature. In the context of U.S.-China tension, and the frequent demonization of the country’s regime, showcasing his hard-hitting films The Empty Nest, Factory Boss, and The Rib (Director’s Cut) takes on a particularly acute significance; all stories focus unblinkingly on hot-button issues through unassuming characters and straightforward storylines that turn the spotlight on societal fault lines and fractures with impact far beyond the country’s borders. Making their North American premieres are Wang Chao’s A Woman, a tale both simple and sweeping in scope that chronicles the sexual and political day-to-day existence of a female factory worker during the years of the Cultural Revolution, and Liu Jian’s Art College 1994, a fond satire of student life told in his charmingly stark and sardonic animation style, made famous by his previous film, Have a Nice Day (2017).

NYAFF’s bold and diverse South Korean lineup, presented with the support of the Korean Cultural Center New York (KCCNY), includes Lee Hae-young’s Phantom, an action-packed spy drama set in 1933 that is one of this year’s biggest hits in the country; the boisterous family comedy Bear Man, from Park Sung-kwang, featuring Park Sung-woong in two indelible roles; Hail to Hell, the impressive feature debut of female helmer Lim Oh-jeong, about two oddballs who track down the bully who pushed them to the brink of suicide; the rousing underdog dramedy Rebound from Chang Hang-jun, in which a group of misfits come together to play nonstop basketball for eight days straight in the KBA National Tournament; and A Tour Guide from Kwak Eun-mi, the touching and timely story of a young North Korean defector who excels at leading Chinese-language tours of Seoul but lives a maladjusted, precarious life as a stranger in a strange land.

NYAFF’s Japanese lineup, supported by the Japan Foundation, is led by the North American Premiere of veteran auteur Junji Sakamoto’s audacious, aesthetically brilliant new jidaigeki, Okiku and the World, which he will be on hand to introduce. Also a must-see is the New York Premiere of Daishi Matsunaga’s heralded LGBTQ+ love story Egoist. The director will be joined on stage by leading actor Ryohei Suzuki (2015 NYAFF Audience Award winner; HK: Forbidden Super Hero; Last of the Wolves), a superstar in his native Japan, and the 2023 NYAFF Screen International Rising Star Asia honoree. A superstar of another sort, musician-actor Satoru Iguchi (King Gnu) will also be on hand at FLC for the North American Premiere of In Her Room, an otherworldly erotic tale by veteran female screenwriter Chihiro Ito (Crying Out Love in the Center of the World; Spring Snow), who makes her long-awaited directorial debut with this enigmatic love story.

Tokyo-based Indian director Anshul Chauhan and actor Shogen will appear with their film December, a riveting courtroom drama. Erstwhile New York City resident Takeshi Fukunaga will return with his third feature, the haunting allegory Mountain Woman, a mythic tale of female oppression and liberation starring Toko Miura (Drive My Car). Also showcased in the Japan lineup are A Hundred Flowers, the award-winning directorial debut by Genki Kawamura (superproducer of Monster, Your Name, Belle, and Rage); Ryūichi Hiroki’s tragic study of the maternal instinct in the form of a Rashomon-like procedural, Motherhood; the thrillingly dark genre gem #Manhole by Kazuyoshi Kumakiri; and Shinichi Fujita’s superheroine (or supervillain?) ode to the literal and figurative empowerment of young women, Mayhem Girls.

NYAFF’s Taiwan lineup features some of the most striking and daring new films from the “beautiful island.” Movie star Kai Ko makes his directorial debut with Bad Education, a controversially dark coming-of-age comedy-thriller; the LGBTQ+ action-comedy Marry My Dead Body foments a gender-fluid revolution with its premise of a macho cop who unwittingly marries a gay ghost; and Gaga, by Taiwan’s first indigenous female director, Laha Mebow, who will be in attendance, chronicles a tangled web of drama across three generations of an Atayal tribe family.

NYAFF reaches further across the continent for even more incredible cinematic discoveries. Philippines: I Love You, Beksman is the fabulously campy tale of a “straight guy with a queer eye” who must overcome his gay family’s apprehensions when he meets the superfly girl of his dreams; based on a shocking real-life story, Where Is the Lie? boasts out-of-the-box storytelling and an extraordinarily luminous performance by trans actor EJ Jallorina as the tragically lovelorn target of a sexy but vicious cyberbully; the timely drama 12 Weeks chronicles a fiercely independent 40-year-old woman’s attempts to arrange a safe abortion in a devoutly anti-choice nation where it is illegal. Singapore: Geylang is a wild pop-art genre joyride seething with the tropically hot melting pot flavors of the city-state put through a riotously macabre Moebius strip of neon-noir influences. Thailand: Kitty the Killer is an anarchic action-comedy about a team of top-notch female assassins who must transform a ridiculously goofy young man from zero to hero in order to wreak bloody vengeance on the agency that betrayed them; You & Me & Me is the directorial debut of real-life identical twin sisters, and art may be imitating life in this glorious teenage coming-of-age fever dream where two look-alike siblings fall for the same boy and must confront their true feelings and who they really are, as they experience the pangs of first love. Vietnam: Glorious Ashes, the first film in over a decade from cinematic poet Bui Thac Chuyên, spins a poignant and dizzying tale of love, loneliness, and pyromania in a devastating omnibus-like tangle of interconnected romance gone wrong in yesteryear’s Mekong Delta.

Once again this year, the festival will be co-hosting, with Korean Cultural Center New York and Film at Lincoln Center, a free outdoor screening in Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park. Set for July 21 is Bong Joon Ho’s 2006 masterpiece The Host, arguably one of the greatest monster movies ever made. Highlighting the type of hilarious, ragtag family dynamics that would win him an Oscar for Parasite years later, Bong’s David-versus-Goliath story stars Song Kang-ho and Bae Doona.

A second wave of announcements will be made shortly, containing NYAFF’s Centerpiece and Closing films, the Uncaged Competition lineup and jury, special guests and award honorees, master classes and panels, and other exciting events. NYAFF is also thrilled to host the Opening Night Market on July 14 and the Monday Matsuri to Midnight on July 24, both with live music and Asian food stalls, as well as other parties and receptions.

From the deadly serious to the gleefully absurd, from the disquieting to the freaky, NYAFF continues to celebrate the most vibrant and provocative cinema out of Asia today.

The New York Asian Film Festival is co-presented by the New York Asian Film Foundation and Film at Lincoln Center, and takes place from July 14–30, 2023 at FLC’s Walter Reade Theater (165 West 65th Street, New York, NY), and on July 21–23 at the Barrymore Film Center (153 Main Street, Fort Lee, NJ). It is curated by executive director Samuel Jamier, associate director Claire Marty, China region expert and consultant Hiroshi Fukazawa, and programmers David Wilentz, Karen Severns, Koichi Mori, and Jenny Lin.

Inside the new Barrymore Film Center, a $16M tribute to N.J.’s movie past

By Amy Kuperinsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

There’s a sprawling family tree on the wall of the new Barrymore Film Center.

In a red box at the center: John Barrymore, the vaunted actor of stage and screen. Born in 1882, he would become one of the pillars of America’s first Hollywood — Fort Lee.

In a golden box off to the left: John’s granddaughter Drew Barrymore. The actor, born in 1975, is now a talk show host and social media sensation known for taking great joy in the little things, like running into the rain.

The $16 million Barrymore Film Center, a new 21,500-square-foot cultural space in Fort Lee with a 260-seat movie theater and museum that opened Friday, is a tribute to the borough’s status as the birthplace of the United States film industry.

New Jersey’s place in movie history is often overlooked, but stands as a point of pride. Now we have a gleaming repository for that pride, named for Fort Lee’s “royal” film family.

Major film studios like Fox, Universal, Goldwyn Pictures and World Pictures once called Fort Lee home, as did Alicé Guy-Blache, the first woman director, who owned Solax Studios.

By 1915, the town’s 17 bustling film studios meant that Fort Lee was populated by movie industry figures.

“The livelihoods of hundreds and hundreds of people were all about making movies,” says Nelson Page, executive director of the Barrymore.

The nonprofit Friends of the Barrymore Film Center runs the Main Street institution, which was funded by the borough of Fort Lee.

“They took a big risk in building this, and that’s why I say nobody does it better than Fort Lee,” Page says.

The ‘royal’ family of Fort Lee

The Barrymore’s airy, Hollywood feel sets it apart from imposing Fort Lee high-rises and the rest of Main Street.

It’s all silver and white, adorned with a bold splash of that unmistakable signal of celebrity, both in the lobby and up a cascading staircase:

Red carpet.

So, will Drew Barrymore be walking this red carpet anytime soon?

So far there are no appearances from the actor on the books, Page says. But she would be a most welcome guest.

After all, these are her people — and acting is certainly the family business.

The Barrymore, which had a grand opening gala fundraiser Oct. 15, launches with a museum exhibit celebrating the Barrymore family, that “royal” family of the early film scene.

John Barrymore’s father (and Drew’s great-grandfather), actor Maurice Barrymore, had a house in town where John lived with his older brother, Lionel, and older sister, Ethel — all actors (their mother was actor Georgiana Drew).

“What made the Barrymores so amazing is that they had developed this wonderful theatrical career in New York City,” Page says. “Then what happened was they made the transition to film, and that transition made them mega-famous. And so they were famous for two different sets of audiences.”

The movies they filmed in Fort Lee were in black-and-white, but the exhibit, open at the 2,500-square-foot museum through the end of April, is in full color. It’s a collection replete with large, vivid move posters and props from Broadway shows, like John Barrymore’s throne and dagger from his successful 1922 run in “Hamlet.” (A Broadway theater has borne Ethel Barrymore’s name since 1928; her grandson was expected to visit the center.)

Films opening the Barrymore included the John Barrymore comedy “Twentieth Century” (1934), the Barrymore drama “Counsellor at Law” (1933), the Barrymore romance “Don Juan” (1926) — the first feature film with synchronized sound (not dialogue) — and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1920), a silent film starring the actor, with live organ at the Barrymore Center from John Baratta.

The Barrymore will be a home to film retrospectives, film festivals and regular movie screenings — including more silent films, sometimes with live musical accompaniment.

It is a big draw of the new theater, whose curved, cavern-like walls were designed for optimal acoustics. It’s a throwback to Page’s days running theaters, when he would host live organ performances when screening silent films.

The Barrymore also boasts an orchestra pit, which will be christened Oct. 29 when the center screens the 1925 silent film classic “The Phantom of the Opera,” starring Lon Chaney. The New Jersey Festival Orchestra and soprano Sydney Anderson will perform live.

Keeping the movies alive

Page worked in theatrical exhibition for 33 years, starting in 1979.

He owned movie theaters in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Now the 68-year-old finds himself opening another theater at a time when the very act of going to the movies is in danger of disappearing.

Page sees his role as not just being an executive, but also a steward of something precious to him — the legacy of the moviegoing experience.

“Everything I know in my life, I learned by going to the movies,” Page says. “And I think a lot of people feel the same way.”

The center’s director has been heartened by people’s passion for those early movies.

“There is a tremendous wave of rediscovery of cinematic roots,” says Page, who lives in Hamburg. (”I got to be in love to drive 120 miles a day,” he says).

“Silent films get a bad rap because they’re improperly timed and they’re jumpy, but then again I dare anybody to see ‘City Lights’ (1931) and not cry. I dare anybody to see ‘The Last Laugh’ (1924) and not be totally heartbroken. I dare anybody to see ‘The Big Parade’ (1925) and not be amazed at the cruelty of World War I. These films were incredibly perceptive and amazingly intuitive ... if you want to see raw cinema, you see silent.”

Page got his first movie theater gig in the ’70s after working as a media specialist at his alma mater, Dumont High School, when he was 17. He started as a doorman at Fairview Cinema.

“I was there two days before I decided, ‘This is what I want to do for the rest of my life,’” Page says. “I was a doorman for three days, then I was the assistant manager. And I just fell in love with the business.”

In less than two years, he had his own theater — Cedar Lane Cinemas in Teaneck.

He calls it his “film school in reverse.” He wasn’t going to make movies, but he could appreciate them and share them with others.

It was not an easy business. But Page stuck with it after leaving the Teaneck theater, later operating the Galaxy Theatre in Guttenberg and returning to Cedar Lane. Eventually, though, remaining in the business became “economically impossible,” he says.

“A Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday night, even in a 250-seat theater, if there are 10 people there, it’s a lot,” Page says. “You’re holding your breath for the whole week to get to Saturday night. And if it snows, you’re dead.”

He can wax nostalgic all day about the years when movie theater companies owned film studios, but the sobering reality is that today’s theaters are eclipsed by the massive variety of entertainment options that don’t require people to go anywhere.

“You step on the threshold of grave peril if you don’t look at this as a business,” Page says.

Motion picture capital of the world

Fort Lee has seen the consequences of competing interests.

By the ’20s and ’30s, many of the town’s 17 movie studios had burned down or been destroyed. By the end of World War II, most physical evidence of them was gone.

“When you tell people that Fort Lee, New Jersey, was the motion picture capital of the world, everybody laughed,” Page says. “They just thought it was the funniest thing in the world, but it’s absolutely true.”

Pioneering Black director Oscar Micheaux made his films in Fort Lee. So did D.W. Griffith.

“In fact, where the film center now stands is in a shot of a Mack Sennett film called, ‘The Curtain Pole’ (1909),” Page says. “You can see clear as day, right on Main Street there, where the film center now stands. So I mean there’s movie history all around us.”

If the first film directors wanted a Western look, a wilderness scene, a waterside setting or a city, New Jersey had it, along with those famous action-ready cliffs above the Hudson River — which forever became associated with the term “cliffhanger” and silent serial star Pearl White.

The Barrymore Center calls on us to remember.

Sitting just outside the George Washington Bridge, the theater and museum are what Page thinks can be their own bridge from film past to film future.

As much as it is a tribute to Jersey’s place in the early days of the movie business, the Barrymore places Fort Lee firmly in the still-twinkling cinematic firmament. Twin triangles on the exterior of the center intentionally point westward, toward Hollywood.

Page has his own family connection to Fort Lee — his maternal grandfather was a riveter from Guatemala who worked on the George Washington Bridge for four years.

“Knowing that there was a project that he worked on 300 yards away, it kind of is an amazing thing,” he says. “Every time I walk out of the building, I always look at the New Jersey tower, and I’m thinking, ‘I hope he’s proud.’”

A home for cinephiles

Page has been chairman of the Fort Lee Film Commission since 2000.

“This is the culmination of all my experience,” he told NJ Advance Media on a recent tour of the light-filled, windowed Barrymore, lined with more movie posters down the halls.

“People often have asked me the question, ‘Why did all the studios move out of Fort Lee?’ Because of greed.”

It helped that the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce beckoned with land and sunny weather. And New Jersey’s Thomas Edison, who founded the first film studio, Black Maria in West Orange, put a crimp in filmmakers’ plans when his trust with George Eastman charged licensing fees to use cameras made by Edison and film from Eastman Kodak.

The original idea for the Barrymore, hatched in partnership with Mayor Mark Sokolich, was to build a commercial theater. But it evolved into a repertory theater, Page says — a venue with red curtains and seats to match the red carpet, one that would recognize the Jersey roots of the movie business as well as emerging filmmakers.

It’s been seven years since the conception of the project, and the opening comes four years after the groundbreaking.

“We figured it would take 18 months to get the building built,” Page says.

The COVID-19 pandemic froze that timeline, but now he’s proud to throw the doors open every weekend.

“This is built for regional appeal,” Page says. “We want people from all over to participate.”

The building’s design is intended to be modern with a nod to the past — with art deco influences and references to famous venues like Radio City Music Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House, he says.

This will be cinema presented with care, Page promises.

“Motion picture exhibition is an art form,” he says. “It’s all about the lights. It’s all about the smell. It’s all about the popcorn. It’s all about presentation and creating an atmosphere where people want to come back.”

Many films will be shown in their original format on the Barrymore’s 20-by-40-foot screen. November brings “Patton” (1970) in 35 mm.

“We want to give them a taste of what this was like through the director’s eye,” Page says.

That also means valuing black-and-white movies for the rich contrasts they bring to the screen.

“These films were crafted specifically to be shadowed and textured,” he says. “That’s where you get these wonderful film noir movies. Film noir is all in light and dark shadows and gray tones. If you made those films color, they would lose the impact and importance.”

The center’s walk of fame includes the Barrymores, Mary Pickford and silent film stars Theda Bara, Pearl White and Lon Chaney.

“These are the people who made films in Fort Lee and left their mark in cinema history,” Page says.

But the Barrymore isn’t just trying to appeal to fans of early film. Programming will span 120 years of moviemaking.

“Especially contemporary filmmakers,” Page says, “because that’s the future of all this. Ultimately, we are who we were. We want to continue that rich film tradition.”

There’s a full lineup of movies embracing the Halloween spirit, like Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow” (1999), Jim Harman’s “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (1975), Tobe Hooper’s “Poltergeist” (1982) and Ivan Reitman’s “Ghostbusters” (1984). You can catch a doubleheader of “The Thing” — the 1951 version and the 1982 version.

On the schedule next summer: A boot camp for high school filmmakers.

“We want to try to entertain. We want to educate. And we want to certainly enthrall,” Page says.

He sees the center’s invitation to cinema from all eras as an alternative to the often solitary experience of streaming via mobile device.

“That’s what we’re providing in a very big way ... that movies can still be a shared experience,” Page says.

Though Fort Lee paid for the construction of the center, its $1 million annual operating budget now passes to the nonprofit Friends of the Barrymore to manage. Admission to the museum, which is open on days of screenings, is free, while film tickets go for $15 a pop ($9 for members).

Before the opening of the building, the Barrymore hosted a virtual short film festival for two years. This April, the event will be in person in Fort Lee.

So far, more than 600 people have joined the Friends of the Barrymore. They live in New Jersey, but also California, Florida, Canada and the United Kingdom, Page says.

“These people want to support film,” he says. “They want to support the idea of movies and make sure that it lasts forever.”

Original Article

A Shrine to the Movies — and the Barrymores

Jim Beckerman / NorthJersey.com / Published 0ct 19, 2022

The new $16 million Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, finally opening Oct. 21 after two years of COVID-related delays, is a lot of things.

It's a museum. It's a 267-seat repertory film theater. It's a reception space. It's a tribute to Fort Lee's role, 120 years ago, as the birthplace of the movie industry.

It's also a monument — the greatest since Joyce Kilmer — to a tree. The branching, forking family tree of America's greatest acting dynasty, the Barrymores, takes up an entire wall of the museum area. They, too, have roots in Fort Lee.

"When you look at that family tree, you realize how far back they go," said Mayor Mark J. Sokolich, who spearheaded the project along with some very knowledgeable film people.

"What made the Barrymores so amazing is that they were a theatrical family that made the jump to film," said Nelson Page, executive director of the new facility.

Famous family

You probably know Drew — star of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" and "Ever After." Also maybe her grand-uncle, Lionel — who torments Jimmy Stewart every Christmas as mean Mr. Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946).

But bigger than either, in their day, were John Barrymore, "The Great Profile," the definitive Hamlet of his generation, and Ethel Barrymore, namesake of a theater on West 47th Street. They, and many other Barrymores, are celebrated in the exhibit "The Barrymores: The Royal Family of Fort Lee," at the museum space through April 30.

There are a lot of them. And they are genetically unmistakable.

"I had two guys delivering some equipment to the film center a few weeks ago," Page said. "I brought them around to a portrait of Ethel, and one guy said, 'Well, that's Drew Barrymore right there.' And I said, no, that's Ethel Barrymore — circa 1912.' They were stunned."

The Barrymore Center is about much more than this extraordinary family — though they'll be highlighted in the coming weeks.

The center opens to the public the weekend of Oct. 21 with a Barrymore six-pack. On Friday, Oct. 21, you can see John in "Twentieth Century" (1934; 7:15 p.m.) and "Counsellor at Law" (1933; 9:15 p.m.). On Saturday there's "Don Juan" (1926; 1 p.m.), "A Free Soul" (1931; 4:15 p.m. — this one stars John's brother Lionel) and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1920; 7:30 p.m.).

These films will be shown in the center's state-of-the-art auditorium — whose scalloped, Deco-ish ceiling, designed by architect Daria Pizzetta, is a nod to both Radio City Music Hall and the retro-futurist designs of William Cameron Menzies, the visionary behind the 1936 sci-fi classic "Things to Come." This is a theater for movie people, by movie people.

"We wanted something that had the feel of the future, with a tip of the hat to the past," Page said.

Fully equipped

Three projectors will enable the Barrymore to screen virtually any format: 4K digital for the latest blockbuster; 35 mm and 70 mm projectors for vintage films that aren't available any other way.

An orchestra pit — perhaps the first designed for a movie theater since the 1920s — can accommodate up to 20 musicians for revivals of silent films. The 20-by-40-foot screen will dominate a stage big enough to mount a live show. There is a three-keyboard organ. Accompanist John Baratta will be doing the honors at the Oct. 22 screening of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

"In the silent days, they used to have a full orchestra on weekends, and they'd use the organ during the week," Page said. "The organ was the voice of silent films. Then, once we got into the sound era, the organ still brought live sound for overtures and intermissions."

The talkie transition began in 1926 — and naturally, a Barrymore was at the center of that, too. "Don Juan," starring John at his most lovably roguish, was the first feature with prerecorded "Vitaphone" sound. It paved the way, a year later, for 1927's "The Jazz Singer," the film that really lit the fire.

In sum, the Barrymores are key to film — just as film is key to Fort Lee.

John, Ethel and Lionel all made films here in the early days. Between 1910 and 1918, Fort Lee was the center of the world's film production. At least 17 big studios were cranking out movies in this Hollywood-on-the-Hudson, including some whose names we still know: Universal, Fox, Paramount (originally Artcraft). By the 1920s, they'd all packed up and moved to California.

"This was at one point in time the motion picture capital of the world," Page said. "It was the first studio town."

The big picture

The Barrymore Center is about that history, too.

A second-floor gallery features plaques honoring some of the pioneers who did their early work here. Stars like Mary Pickford, Theda Bara, Lon Chaney and Pearl White (whose movie serial "cliffhangers" were actually filmed on the Palisades cliffs). Producers like William Fox, Sam Goldwyn and Universal's Carl Laemmle.

There were also groundbreakers like Alice Guy-Blaché, the first woman studio head, and Oscar Micheaux, the trailblazing African American director whose "Symbol of the Unconquered" was filmed here in 1920. A "Walk of Fame," on the pavement outside the center, salutes these and other local heroes. "I think it's important for future generations to recognize these names," Page said.

But the Barrymore, its creators emphasize, will be about Fort Lee's present and future, as much as its past.

On Thursdays starting Nov. 17, there will be a 10-week program of Korean films. South Korea happens to be at the center of the movie universe right now, just as Fort Lee was a century ago. Films like the Oscar-winning "Parasite" and the hit TV series "Squid Game" have been industry game-changers. And it also happens that 23% of Fort Lee's population is Korean.

"Korean movies are going through an amazing renaissance right now," Page said. "Film is just so elastic; it can stretch so many different ways. We're going to explore all those boundaries."

The full schedule for the coming months is still under construction, but among other highlights is a Judy Garland centennial festival including "The Wizard of Oz" and "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1 p.m. and 3:45 p.m. Nov. 25), a big-screen revival of "Lawrence of Arabia" (7 p.m. Nov. 19), and a showing of Disney's 1959 "Sleeping Beauty" (7 p.m. Nov. 5) coupled with a live appearance by one of its creators, Floyd Norman — the studio's first African American animator. Also, on Dec. 17, there will be a holiday screening of "It's a Wonderful Life." Because of course.

"People remember Lionel Barrymore because of 'It's a Wonderful Life,' " Page said. "So all this ties together very neatly."

Behind the curtain

Much as the Barrymore is a salute to Fort Lee, to the movies and to the Barrymores, it's also a monument to some other, very persistent people — living and dead. Movie lovers who believed in it and spent years, even decades, laying the groundwork. It was Sokolich, the mayor, who proposed a major movie theater for the city's burgeoning downtown. But it was a cadre of Fort Lee historians and film lovers who convinced him just what kind of theater it should be.

"I never get into these things unless I know I have the people who are committed and passionate about them," Sokolich said. "And with this theater, we have some incredibly passionate people."

Page is one of them. The Hamburg resident has spent a lifetime in the movie exhibition business, as past owner-operator of the Galaxy in Guttenberg, the Cedar Lane Cinemas in Teaneck, and the Lafayette Theatre in Suffern, N.Y.

Another is Richard Koszarski, the film scholar whose "Fort Lee, the Film Town" and "Hollywood on the Hudson" are definitive studies. Critic Theodore Huff, town historian Sylvia Abbott and film buff Lou Azzollini — all deceased —deserve a nod, as does director Thomas Hanlon, whose 1964 documentary short "Before Hollywood, There was Fort Lee" started it all.

"The Barrymore Film Center is the fruit of all those years of effort by so many people," Koszarski said.

Above all there is Tom Meyers — executive director of the Fort Lee Film Society, a lifetime resident who had made it his 30-year mission to wake the world from its amnesia about Fort Lee's movie past. "We built consensus in the town, awareness," Meyers said.

All his life, he'd been hearing hints of the town's past glories. Both his grandparents had worked for the industry. "My grandmother Carrie Viola told me that as a child in Fort Lee, they let the kids out of school early so they could be extras in films," he said. "They paid a dollar a day and free lunch."

When Meyers grew up here, the few remaining studio buildings were derelict hulks. Few people in town had any idea what they'd been. Few movie histories mentioned Fort Lee.

In the early 1990s, Meyers began working to raise the town's movie profile. In 2001 he helped get the corner of Linwood Avenue and Main Street renamed Theda Bara Way, after the famous "vamp" who lured men to their doom at Fox Studios. In 2012, the corner of Washington Avenue and Fifth Street was rechristened Carl Laemmle Way.

'Save the Barrymore House'

But Meyers also suffered defeats. All his horses and men couldn't prevent the area's first studio, Champion (founded in 1910), from being razed in 2013. And one of his most heartbreaking setbacks was in 2001, when the Borough Council voted 4-2 to demolish the Barrymore House.

"We had a big public meeting," said Meyers, who was then on the council. "We had over 100 people in T-shirts saying 'Save the Barrymore House.' "

This was a ramshackle Victorian on Hammett Avenue in the Coytesville section — Meyers' own neighborhood — where actor Maurice Barrymore raised his three famous children, Ethel, Lionel and John. With all that history, it still came down.

"The mayor at the time, Jack Alter, told me publicly, 'Someday there will be a building worthy of the Barrymore name in this town, so don't worry,' " Meyers said. "And he was right."

The 21,500-square-foot Barrymore Film Center is, arguably, a more fitting shrine to the acting dynasty. Particularly through April, when the Barrymore exhibit will acquaint visitors with Barrymores galore.

It's a line that stretches back to actor John Drew, from the 1840s — and encompasses such ancillary characters as Bramwell Fletcher (he was the archaeologist who went mad when he saw Boris Karloff lurch out of his sarcophagus in 1933's "The Mummy"), comedian Tom Green (briefly married to "E.T.'s" Drew) and Dolores Costello, wife of John and grandmother of Drew, the beautiful, fragile mother of 1942's "The Magnificent Ambersons."

Some of the best material relates to John Barrymore — famous in his day not only as the world's greatest actor and most handsome man, but also the world's greatest womanizer and lush. His affairs with Evelyn Nesbit and Mary Astor, and his drunken escapades on and off stage, were legendary.

Barrymore's chair, dagger and prompt-book from "Hamlet," and his suit of armor from "Richard III" — among other items on display — testify to his acting prowess.

And the other stuff? Ask anyone in Fort Lee.

"These stories were handed down from generation to generation," Meyers said. "We knew an old lady in the neighborhood who dated John Barrymore when he was there. Her father took a shotgun and went to see Maurice Barrymore and said, 'Keep him away from my daughter.' "

New center to highlight Fort Lee's contributions to film industry

FORT LEE, New Jersey (WABC) -- The bright lights of Hollywood have overshadowed Fort Lee's contributions to the film industry, but now a new museum highlights its rich past.

Hollywood may be Tinsel Town, but Fort Lee, New Jersey is where the movie industry got its start.

"It bloomed to the point where there were 17 studios here," said Nelson Page, Executive Director of Barrymore Film Center. "Many, many more production companies."

The studios in Fort Lee were just blocks away from each other and attracted many big stars performing in New York City's theatre district.

"Fort Lee was growing because it was near Broadway, and Broadway is where the actors were, and the heads of the theatrical companies - they were based here," museum curator Richard Koszarski said.

New York State says the owner of Sunrise Pizza in Rockville Centre owes his workers hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages. Kristin Thorne has the story.

The silent film industry became talking pictures with many of the earliest movies being shot in Fort Lee. From 1910 until the 1930's, this was home to big film studios.

"The ones we would remember were owned by Universal, Fox and Paramount," Koszarski said.

"The first great actors, the first great movie stars came from here," Page said. "When you're talking about Pearl White and Theda Bara, they made their first film here."

The first family of the movie industry lived and worked in Fort Lee.

John Barrymore became a famous dramatic actor in "Hamlet."

Ethel Barrymore gave up her stage career to do movies along with Lionel Barrymore and teamed up to turn Fort Lee into America's first film capitol.

It is now the home to the Barrymore Film Center, which is set to open its doors on Monday.

"Part of our mission here is to educate. We also want to enthrall, and we also want to entertain," Page said.

Fort Lee boasts being the home of the first movie production company owned by a woman, and where the first Black director made his impact.

The new center will welcome film students to learn the craft while merging the past to the present and setting the stage for the future.

THE MYSTERIARCH: 'HOUDINI CLIFF' FOUND IN THE PALISADES

by Sean Doran

In continuing my search for unknown locations featured in Houdini's 1922 film, The Man From Beyond, here is a bit of exciting news! 

The iconic landmark which showcases the dramatic and deadly struggle between Houdini's Howard Hillary and Arthur Maude's Dr. Gilbert Trent atop a towering cliff has been found in the precipices of Palisades Interstate Park in New Jersey.

"Houdini Cliff" is actually a promontory called "High Tom's" and is located in the Englewood Cliffs area of The Palisades. What makes this discovery even more exciting is that "High Tom's" is around 400 feet above the Hudson River, meaning that Houdini was, in fact, quite a way up there during the filming of this particular scene. With Houdini always doing his own stunts, I think this is right up there with some of the more dangerous feats he ever performed.

Credit for confirming this previously unknown filming location goes out to Eric Nelsen, historical interpreter for the Palisades Interstate Park in New Jersey. Eric along with the Barrymore Film Center / Fort Lee Film Commission made this discovery possible.

I originally set out to locate this setpiece along the Niagara gorge area and Devils Hole State Park in Niagara Falls, NY, but quickly realized the geography and river backdrop was not accurate to that shown during the scene in the film. After a few days of online research, I turned to the other known filming locations of The Man From Beyond, specifically Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Zeroing in on the birthplace of the motion picture industry, I contacted Tom Meyers of the Barrymore Film Center / Fort Lee Film Commission who quickly put me in contact with Eric Nelsen. Within a few days, Eric hit the trail and had quickly confirmed the location by only using a few low-resolution pictures and film clips I sent him for reference.

The pictures below of "High Tom's" as it is today were provided by Eric, who I must say lined up the shots perfectly with the original photos and scene! Thank you, Eric!

Thanks once again to Eric Nelsen, Tom Meyers, Richard Koszarsk and the Barrymore Film Center / Fort Lee Film Commission for working with me to uncover this mystery. Without their enthusiastic assistance, we wouldn't have this newly found connection to Houdini.

On Cue Chris Costello Birthplace of Moving Pictures- It's Not Where You May Think

The birthplace of films-Journey into the world of early film making with Historian Tom Meyers

http://chrisoncue.buzzsprout.com/416977/1853908-birthplace-of-moving-pictures-it-s-not-where-you-may-think

New York Times: ‘Be Natural’ Review: Rescuing Alice Guy Blaché, a Film Pioneer, From Oblivion

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché

Directed by Pamela B. Green

Documentary 1h 43m

By A.O. Scott

At the beginning of Pamela B. Green’s lively and informative new documentary, a bevy of movie people — directors, actors, scholars and others — are asked if they know anything about Alice Guy Blaché, who is the subject of the film. A few of them do (Ava DuVernay, for one), but most admit that they have no clue. Viewers who are similarly ignorant shouldn’t feel bad, and in the best pedagogical spirit Green turns blank looks and sheepishly shrugged shoulders into a teaching moment. “Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché” seeks both to help rescue Guy Blaché from oblivion and to explain how she got there in the first place.

Alice Guy was born into a bourgeois French family in 1873. An interview conducted more than 90 years later reveals a woman very much of her era and class, with crisp diction, faultless grammar and a mildly ironical way of talking about even painful and contentious matters. Trained in stenography, Alice was hired, at 22, as an assistant to Léon Gaumont, who would soon become one of the founders of the French film industry.

Guy (who married the British cameraman Herbert Blaché in 1907) merits that description as much as her boss. Often referred to as a pioneer — one of a handful of important women filmmakers active in cinema’s earliest days — she was more than that. Present at an early, private Paris showing of one of Louis and Auguste Lumière’s first shorts, Guy was among the first to explore the storytelling potential of the new medium. At the Gaumont studio, where she worked until 1906, she directed hundreds of fantasies, comedies, melodramas and historical films. After moving to the United States, she set up her own company, Solax Studios, continuing her prolific output in the burgeoning proto-Hollywood of Fort Lee, N.J.

She was, in sum, a studio chief as well as a director and producer — a key figure in the emergence of two major national cinemas. The recovery of this reputation is central to Green’s project, and she builds on the work of historians and archivists, including Guy Blaché’s biographer, Alison McMahan. “Be Natural” is its own making-of documentary, following Green’s gumshoe efforts to track down letters and ledgers, artifacts and descendants. She enlists a specialist in facial recognition to determine whether a woman in an ancient moving picture is indeed Guy Blaché. She zigzags across Los Angeles in search of a lab that will digitize antique videotapes. She details her own cross-country and trans-Atlantic peregrinations as well as those undertaken by her heroine more than a century earlier.

The result is occasionally a little frantic — animated segments sometimes bring the past to life and sometimes get in the way — and often tremendously moving. The interviews with Guy Blaché and with her daughter, Simone, bring a tender, complicated dimension of personality, and make it feel as if the dawn of movies is not so far away after all. The present-day celebrities, who seem to become instant experts after their initial confessions of cluelessness, add little beyond their own boldface names. (An exception is Jodie Foster, who provides voice-over narration and served as an executive producer.) The preservationists and film historians are the truly fascinating characters, and it would be good to learn even more about the work of rescue and recovery they do.

“Be Natural” is inspiring because it is also appalling. The near-forgetting of Guy Blaché wasn’t just an accident of film history, though the fact that most of her work belongs to the years before World War I made it especially vulnerable to loss. Green notes that she is less well-known than contemporaries like Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner, but those women were also written out of film history or pushed to its margins.

Guy Blaché found America a more welcoming working environment than France. But in both countries the record of her achievements was erased. Her early Gaumont pictures were attributed to her male assistants, and their originality and quality went unrecognized, in spite of evidence of her influence on later auteurs like Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock. When it was remembered at all, Solax Studios was thought of as Herbert Blaché’s company.

Green’s revision of that record is long overdue and just in time, given the present-day reckoning with Hollywood’s stubborn traditions of behind-the-scenes (and onscreen) sexism. Most intriguing are the clips the documentary gathers from Guy Blaché’s films. Many of them look less like old curiosities than lost classics, and their range — from the surreal slapstick of “The Drunken Mattress,” to the domestic melodrama of “Falling Leaves,” to the social satire of “Consequences of Feminism” — is astonishing. (Several have been issued by Kino Lorber in the indispensable “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers” collection). By the end of “Be Natural,” you won’t only have a clear idea of who this remarkable woman was; you may well have acquired a new taste in old movies.

New York Times: Overlooked No More: Alice Guy Blaché, the World’s First Female Filmmaker

Even before women had the right to vote, Blaché, in her actions and in her films, expressed female drives, desires and self-determination.

Published Sept. 6, 2019

Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

By Manohla Dargis

In 1911, The Moving Picture News wrote that Alice Guy Blaché, the first female filmmaker in history, was a “fine example of what a woman can do if given a square chance in life.”

Blaché had already founded a successful film company in the United States by the time the article was published, announcing a new studio she was opening in New Jersey. She soon built that studio, adding to her triumphs. Cinema was Blaché’s passion — she called it her Prince Charming — and it took her across continents and centuries in a life shaped both by soaring achievements and by some of the same struggles that women moviemakers face today.

She was aware of her singularity.

“I have produced some of the biggest productions ever released by a motion picture company,” Blaché told the entertainment weekly The New York Clipper in 1912.

She made — directed, produced or supervised (often doing triple duty) — about 1,000 films, many of them short, the standard at the time.

She would later leave the industry at a time when her life was marred by personal and professional disappointments, then spend years trying to claim her place in the very history that she had helped make.

Like other trailblazing women from cinema’s formative years, Blaché has been discovered, somehow overlooked and rediscovered anew. Only now, largely because of the feminist film scholars who are writing women back into history, does her place seem secure.

Blaché got her start in films when she was 22 and working as a secretary in Paris for Léon Gaumont, an inventor who had begun manufacturing motion-picture cameras. To demonstrate them to clients, his company made short films that Blaché thought could be better.

“I had read a good deal,” she wrote in “The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché,” which was ushered into publication posthumously in 1976 by the historian Anthony Slide. And she had done some “amateur theatricals.”

Blaché, center, in a scene from “Sage-Femme de Première Classe” (“First Class Midwife”), from 1902, about a young couple who go shopping for a baby. (Blaché played the husband.)Credit...Photograph Collections of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

She asked Gaumont if she could film a few scenes.

“It seems like a silly, girlish thing to do,” Gaumont told her, Blaché recalled many decades later in a French television interview, “but you can try if you want. On one condition: that your office work does not suffer.”

Armed with a cameraman, an actress and a painted backdrop, she made “La Fée aux Choux” (“The Cabbage Fairy”) in 1896, her first film. A pantomimed one-minute charmer, it shows a young woman who, with a smile and a bosom wreathed in flowers, plucks squalling naked babies from a cabbage patch constructed out of wood. Some historians believe that Blaché’s inaugural effort was “Sage-Femme de Première Classe” (“First Class Midwife”) her 1902 remake about a young couple who go shopping for a baby. (Blaché played the husband.)

Gaumont soon made Blaché the head of film production at his company, where she produced and supervised hundreds of films, helped create an organized studio system years before Hollywood was a company town and trained luminaries of the art like Louis Feuillade. When she moved to the United States, where she resumed her film career, her time at Gaumont was touted in profiles. In 1912, the trade journal The Movie Picture World, wrote: “She inaugurated the presentation of little plays on the screen by that company some 16 or 17 years ago.”

Alice Ida Antoinette Guy was born in Saint-Mandé, on the eastern edge of Paris, on July 1, 1873. Her parents, Marie and Émile Guy, were French but lived in Chile, where her father was a bookseller; Marie returned to France for Alice’s birth and then left the child with a grandmother. Three years later, Marie returned for Alice, and they sailed to Chile. While passing through the Strait of Magellan, near Chile’s southern tip, as she recalled in her memoir, she conjured up fairies and beasts on walls of ice — an early, whimsical prelude to her screen reveries.

Assorted tragedies in Chile followed, and the Guys eventually returned to France, but over time the family disintegrated, leaving Alice to support her mother.

Much of Alice’s early years seemed to prepare her for a life in cinema, filled as they were with adventures, deprivations and moments of fortitude. In her first secretarial position, in an all-male factory, she recalled, she boldly stood up to a sexual harasser.

“My youth, my inexperience, my sex,” Blaché wrote of her entrance into moviemaking, “all conspired against me.” But she was hardworking and tenacious, and would prove to be prolific.

In 1894, she talked Gaumont, then the second-in-command at a photography company, into hiring her. Not long after, Gaumont formed his own company and Blaché became a pioneer, making films that were colored by hand and others that used a pioneering sound system, which synced visuals with prerecorded wax cylinders. Blaché can be seen in one clip starting a phonograph while she directs both the cast and the crew. Among her Gaumont titles are “La Femme Collante,” a risqué charmer about a maid with an amusingly sticky tongue, and “Le Matelas Alcoolique” about a peripatetic mattress with a drunken man sewn into it.

In 1907, she married Herbert Blaché, another Gaumont employee, and resigned as head of film production to accompany him to the United States, where he was sent to promote Gaumont’s sync-sound film system. The undertaking was a bust. But in 1910, two years after giving birth to their daughter, Simone, Alice Blaché formed the Solax Company and began making her own movies. She was so successful that in 1912 — the year she gave birth to their son, Reginald — Blaché built her own state-of-the-art studio in Fort Lee, N.J., then a bustling film town.

She kept up a heroic pace at Solax. She would jump in her car or on a horse to scout locations, including an orphanage, an opium parlor, night court and Sing Sing prison, where she declined the invitation to witness an execution. She supervised other directors and assistants, oversaw a stock company of adult and child actors, and corralled a menagerie of animal performers, among them rats, lions, panthers and a 600-pound tiger named Princess. On one studio wall she hung a sign that read, “Be Natural.”

Her interest in realism as well as performance dovetailed with what her biographer Alison McMahan said was Blaché’s greatest achievement. Her films, McMahan said in a phone interview, “focused on the psychological perspective of the central characters.

Blaché told The Clipper in 1912: “I have always impressed upon my associate directors that success comes only to those who give the public what it wants, plus something else. That something else I would call our individuality, if you please.”

Blaché expanded her repertoire at Solax with cowboy films like “Two Little Rangers,” which features a pair of gun-toting heroines, one of them a girl with long curls who backs a villain off a cliff. Whether or not it was feminist by design, the film is feminist by default. Blaché wondered if women were ready for the right to vote, but in her actions and in her films she expressed female drives, desires and self-determination.

At Solax, she successfully made the transition to feature filmmaking, creating longer, more narratively complex titles that were well-received, though they also entailed higher production costs and longer preparations. Yet while Blaché navigated the shift to features creatively, she didn’t weather the seismic changes affecting the fast-growing movie world, including monopolistic distribution practices. By 1914, she and Herbert Blaché had joined forces with another enterprise for which they both directed.

The last chapter of Blaché’s filmmaking career was marred by setbacks and disappointments both in her new ventures with her husband and as a director for hire. She made “The Ocean Waif,” a touching romance about an abused young woman and a writer that gives (almost) equal weight to both.

Other films followed, but by the time she directed the well-regarded “Her Great Adventure,” Blaché was struggling with her health, financial difficulties, a broken marriage and continued industry upheaval. She declined to direct a “Tarzan” movie. In 1922, the Solax studio was auctioned off, and Blaché, now divorced, returned to France with her two children.

In France she tried to find film work with no luck. It’s unclear why she didn’t succeed, although by the 1920s, the movies were a big business and no longer as hospitable to women who wanted to make their own films. She sold her books, paintings and other possessions and wrote articles and children’s stories.

She and her daughter, who worked for the American Foreign Service, spent the last years of World War II in Switzerland, where Blaché began writing her memoir. She also tried to find her films, but most were unavailable and presumed lost. She nevertheless persevered, gave interviews and in time gained some recognition for her pioneering role in cinema.

Blaché wrote of her life: “It is a failure; is it a success? I don’t know.” She died on March, 24, 1968, in a nursing home in New Jersey. She was 94.

In 2012, the Fort Lee Film Commission installed a new gravestone for Blaché. The original one had noted only her name and the dates of her birth and death. The new memorial states that Alice Guy Blaché was “first woman motion picture director,” the “first woman studio head” and the “president of the Solax Company, Fort Lee, N.J.”

The memorial is also adorned with the Solax logo: an image of the sun rising on a new day.

NorthJersey.com: One of the first movie moguls was a woman — and her studio was in Fort Lee

Jim Beckerman, North Jersey Record

Published 6:54 a.m. ET April 24, 2019 | Updated 7:27 a.m. ET April 24, 2019

When the movie business began — roughly 1895 — it was the Wild West. There were no rules. And consequently there was no one to tell Alice Guy-Blaché that ladies do not become movie directors.

So you can hardly blame her, in 1896, for becoming the first female film director — for that matter, one of the first film directors, period.

Nor can you blame her for being an innovator in narrative film, sound film, comedy, fantasy, Westerns, and films of social comment, for becoming one of the first film executives, or for building one of the largest, most advanced movie studios of the day in Fort Lee, in 1912. For being, in short, one of the great formative figures in film history.

"She's the mother of cinema," says film director Pamela B. Green, whose documentary film "Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché" opens April 26 at New York's IFC Center on Sixth Avenue (it will later platform out nationwide). It's already been featured at the Cannes, New York and Telluride film festivals.

"She did the work, took the trail, climbed the mountain," Green says.

Jodie Foster narrates the film, which includes commentary from Ava DuVernay, Julie Taymor, Julie Delpy, Geena Davis, and Sir Ben Kingsley and several Blaché relatives, not to mention New Jersey's own Tom Meyers, executive director of the Fort Lee Film Commission, and Teaneck film historian Richard Koszarski ("Fort Lee: The Film Town"). Fort Lee is a big part of this story.

"This was the first American film town, before the industry moved to Hollywood," Meyers says. "That's why Alice Guy-Blaché moved here."

In an era when women are demanding, more than ever, a place at the Hollywood table, "Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché" is a reminder that in the early days, women took a seat anyway — invited or not.

"She had intelligence, and a great sense of humor," Green says. "She was extremely determined, and passionate, and a hard worker. I related to those elements."

"Be Natural" was the phrase, posted on signboards, on the glassed-in stage of Solax Studios, the enormous $100,000 facility that Guy-Blaché, assisted by her husband, Herbert, built on Lemoine Avenue in Fort Lee (where the Acme supermarket, next to Fort Lee High School, is now).

She wanted to remind her actors not to exaggerate, not to be "theatrical," but to behave like real people. Or, as director John Ford later said, in his gruff, masculine way, "Don't act, react." But Guy-Blaché said it first.

"She wanted them to give a sense of realism, so audiences could emotionally relate and say: That's me, or that's my aunt, or that's my cousin," Green says. "She wanted people to have an emotional connection with the films she was making."

Making a name

In her day, movie directors were seldom credited on screen. But Guy-Blaché was still known, at least within the film community.

She gave interviews. She wrote for magazines ("There is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man," she said in Moving Picture World in 1914). Her work was admired — and imitated — by other directors, including Alfred Hitchcock and Sergei Eisenstein. Viewers loved her use of naturalistic settings, and her ability to coax believable performances from actors.

"She helped develop the grammar of cinema," Green says. "She helped move the medium forward when it was in its infancy, when people didn't believe in it."

Guy-Blaché, who spent her last years in Mahwah and is buried there (she died in 1968), spent the final years of her life writing her autobiography, trying to round up the 1,000 or so films she wrote, directed or produced between 1896 and 1922, and trying to set the record straight with film historians (mostly male), who — when they didn't ignore her completely — often attributed her films to other directors.

"If she had lived just a little bit longer, maybe it could have been different," Green says. "But she was old, and the world wasn't ready. I guess my purpose was to be her last chapter, to restore her legacy, which she couldn't do herself, but which she wanted to do very badly."

Guy-Blaché was in the right place at the right time. The time was 1894. The place was Paris, where the 21-year-old Alice got a job as a secretary to a camera company — which was in turn bought by a consortium that became Gaumont, one of the giants of the early film industry.

Movies, then, were little one-minute slices of life: workers leaving a factory, a train pulling into a station. Motion — any kind of motion — was miraculous enough. 

Not for Guy-Blaché. She was literary: Her father had been a bookstore owner. She pronounced the real-life snippets of street traffic, the seaside bathers and frolicking children, dull. She asked her bosses if she could try to make a film of her own. 

"La fée aux choux" — "The Cabbage Fairy" — made in 1896, depicts a sprite in a cabbage patch, harvesting all the newborn babies (Guy-Blaché knew all about cabbage patch kids 80 years before the American toy industry). It was one of the first — if not the first — staged, fictional films, one of the first to tell a story.  And it launched Guy-Blaché on a 25-year career. In short order, she became head of production at Gaumont.

"She gave film the gift of storytelling," Meyers says. "In America, the first narrative film was 'The Great Train Robbery' [1903]. But Alice was making narrative films well before that."

Her range was prodigious. She made dramatic films like "The Birth, Life and Death of Christ" (1906), "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1913), and "Esmeralda" (1905), an early version of "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame." She made comedies, like "Matrimony's Speed Limit" (1913) and "Canned Harmony" (1912). She made Westerns, like "Algie the Miner" (1912) and "Two Little Rangers" (1912).

She made sound films ("True Jiu Jitsu," 1905, "Indiscreet Questions," 1905) more than two decades before "The Jazz Singer." She made fantasy films with trick effects. She made — notably —  films about gender equality, about reversals of sex roles, about women as take-charge heroes ("In the Year 2000," 1912, "A House Divided," 1913, "Hubby Does the Washing," 1912).  For good measure, she made one of the first films with an African-American cast, "A Fool and His Money" (1912).

Coming to America

In 1910, she had come to America with her her husband, Herbert Blaché, who was then chief of Gaumont's American operations. Soon after, they left Gaumont to form their own studio. 

Solax was originally based in Flushing, Queens, but two years later relocated to Fort Lee — then the center of American movie production, with some 17 studios grinding out films. Several of those studios — notably Solax, Éclair, and Pathé — were French. The French, at that time, were at the forefront of film technique. But America was where the audience and the money were. 

"There were so many French filmmakers living in Fort Lee at this time," Meyers says. "There were French-language newspapers here."

The studio, however, didn't last. Guy-Blaché eventually lost Solax — apparently the financial mismanagement of her husband had a lot to do with it — and in time the studio became a film storage facility. In 1964, the building was torn down.

"It was the 1960s, and there wasn't much thought given in those days to film history," Meyers says. "It's only recently that there's been some acknowledgment. Back in the 1960s, it was pretty forgotten."

Forgotten, also, was Guy-Blaché — as were the many women who followed in her footsteps.

While Guy-Blaché was the first female film director, she was not the only one in the early days.

Lois Weber, Ruth Baldwin, Dorothy Arzner, Leontine Sagan, Lotte Reiniger and Wanda Tuchock are just some of the other women who, in cinema's age of innocence, were calling "Lights, camera, action!"  And it wasn't just directors. There were women screenwriters (Anita Loos, Frances Marion, Jeanie MacPherson, June Mathis). There were women producers (Mary Pickford, Alla Nazimova). What happened to them all?

Theirs was the fate of the cowboy, and the internet startup — the fate of the pioneer.

After the freebooting early days are over, big money, regulation and standardization force out the trailblazers. And when Hollywood became big business, one that men could start taking seriously, the powers-that-be decided — in so many words — that a woman's place was in front of the camera, not behind.

"Once it became a viable business, once people saw that movies had a future and could make money, then women got pushed out and men took over," Green says.

Today, as women are struggling to regain a foothold in an industry they were forced out of, 100 years ago, Alice Guy-Blaché is their patron saint.

"She was an artist and an entrepreneur, and that makes her significant," Green says. "She was a mogul."

benaturalthemovie.com

BBC News: Video Guy-Blache: The untold story of first female film director

Hollywood actress Jodie Foster has narrated a documentary paying tribute to Alice Guy-Blache who is credited with being the world’s first female film director.

Blache made her first movie in 1896 and was subsequently involved in the production of some 1,000 films from shorts to features.

BBC Talking Movies’ Tom Brook reports.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-45878334/guy-blache-the-untold-story-of-first-female-film-director

BBC - Travel Was this the First US' Film town?

Fort Lee's days of movie stardom may have been a flash in the pan, but the New Jersey town’s role in the history of film is unmistakable.

By Laura Kiniry

22 February 2019

A famous black-and-white image from the early days of film shows actress Pearl White looking coyly to her side while three men – one standing beside a movie camera, the others closer to the ground behind the actress – are setting up a scene on a precarious cliff above a distant body of water. The now-iconic still is from White’s 1918 film serial The House of Hate, a nail-biting murder mystery that ended in suspenseful cliffhangers each week.

In fact, this is where the term ‘cliffhanger’ (as it refers to film) is believed to have been coined. Still, the setting is far from Hollywood. It’s northern New Jersey – just across the Hudson River from New York City – which for a brief but glorious time in the early 20th Century was the silent film capital of the world.

Walk around Fort Lee today and you’ll see that it’s brimming with modern development. With more than one-third of the borough’s population of Asian origin – and more than a third of that Korean – Fort Lee’s centre bustles with 24-hour eateries serving up everything from pork-bone hotpots to spicy soft tofu soup.

Towering high rises face out across the Hudson toward upper Manhattan, and traffic pours into downtown from both levels of the double-decker George Washington Bridge. Though while film buffs might easily recognise the borough’s landmark bridge from films such as Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, Fort Lee’s role as the birthplace of the motion picture industry seemed to have been lost in the vaults for decades, and is only recently being rediscovered.

“Fort Lee’s movie history was one of those things that was always in the background growing up,” said Eric Nelsen, a historical interpreter for Palisades Interstate Park – the backdrop for White’s House of Hate photo – who grew up in New Jersey’s Bergen County (of which Fort Lee is a part). “But once you start digging into it, all the information is actually overwhelming.”

According to Tom Meyers, founder and executive director of the Fort Lee Film Commission, a non-profit dedicated to preserving and promoting the borough’s unique film history, Fort Lee housed more than a dozen working film studios during World War One – such as the Victor Film Company, Fox Film Corporation and Goldwyn Picture Corporation (the last standing of which, Champion/Universal, was bulldozed in 2013). And if you grew up in town any time since, chances are you had relatives who worked in the industry. “My grandmother got her start as a film extra and then later moved on to cutting film,” Meyers said, “and my mother and uncles worked for the studio that would later merge with Universal.”

From approximately 1909 to 1918, Fort Lee was the centre of the cinematic universe (Hollywood’s first film studio opened in 1911, but it took until the early ‘20s for the West Coast film industry to become well known). Inventor Thomas Edison had already built his Black Maria, ‘America’s first movie studio’, in nearby West Orange, New Jersey, where he kept his home and laboratory, and with the help of his assistant, William Dickson, invented the kinetoscope, precursor to the film projector.

There was local momentum for sure, but Fort Lee was also camera-ready. The greater borough’s natural and manmade landscapes made it the perfect place for picture-making. There were the Palisades’ sheer cliffs – an easy stand-in for canyon country – and below them the Hudson River, which could be made to look like a seaside harbour, coastal stretch or in some cases even an ocean. The top of the Palisades’ were a mix of wide-open plateau and tall trees that at the right angle resembled the woods of England, as was the case in the obscure 1912 adventure short, Robin Hood. Then there was the town itself, with its wood-frame houses, narrow streets and a small stretch of stone and granite businesses that served as ‘Anytown, USA’. Directors even rented horses from a nearby stable for films’ many Wild West scenes. With such a wealth of scenic variety in such proximity to a major hub like New York City, Fort Lee appeared to have had it made.

A lot of what the industry takes for granted today was all figured out in Fort Lee

“It’s strange to think that movie making is so ubiquitous today, yet it all began here in Fort Lee barely a century ago,” Nelson said. “A lot of what the industry takes for granted today – things like using multiple cameras for different angled shots, and ways to diffuse light – it was all figured out in Fort Lee.”

With the films came the actors, many of whom went on to become big Hollywood stars: names like Fatty Arbuckle, Mary Pickford and Theda Bara all got their start in Fort Lee. Others, such as the first-ever host of the Academy Awards, Douglas Fairbanks, moved to the borough for its cinema opportunities as well. The Marx Brothers began their film career here with their first-ever comedy short, the now-lost Humor Risk – and patriarch of the Barrymore acting dynasty, Maurice Barrymore, was not only a Fort Lee resident but also helped build a local volunteer fire station. To raise money, he staged a play called Man of the World at the former Buckheister’s Beer Garden on Main Street, where a car park now stands. His 18-year-old son John – Drew Barrymore’s grandfather and one of the most celebrated actors of his era – played the starring role. It was his acting debut.

But Fort Lee’s film heyday was short lived. When frigid temperatures bring the US’ Mid-Atlantic region to a standstill and winter transforms the Hudson River into a sea of slush and ice, it’s easy to see why the movie industry soon left northern New Jersey for Hollywood’s perpetually sunny skies. A coal shortage that left studios unheated during a brutally cold New Jersey winter, coupled with the influenza pandemic of 1918, caused many of Fort Lee’s movie studios to close indefinitely. Rather than reopen, they simply up and moved to year-round warm and temperate California. Many of the borough’s studios were left abandoned and eventually burned down or were torn down over the years for redevelopment, and Fort Lee’s film history became a thing of the past.

In fact, when local resident Sean Ng first moved to Fort Lee from Manhattan about five years ago, he knew nothing about its days as a cinema star. But soon he started noticing large plaques detailing the borough’s legendary past erected in several spots throughout town, especially closer to its commercial centre. “[Now that I’ve discovered the local film history], it feels rather special,” he said. “When you speak of movies, Hollywood usually comes to mind, not Fort Lee, New Jersey.” He asked some his neighbours for more information, but few of them knew much the borough’s film era.

It’s strange to think the place that pioneered the world’s movie industry remains so low-key about its background, but there’s been active motion to change this. Along with nearly a dozen plaques commemorating Fort Lee’s film history, there are also several decorative street signs honouring local stars of the silent screen, including John Barrymore Way (on the corner of Main Street and Central Road, where the original Buckheister’s once stood) and Theda Bara Way (on the corner of Main Street and Linwood Avenue, named for the femme fatale actress who became one of film’s original sex symbols). Just this autumn, ground broke on the Barrymore Film Center, a film museum and 260-seat cinema scheduled to open in February 2020, with its entrance right across the street from Fort Lee’s historical First National Bank building, used in the DW Griffith 1911 drama Her Awakening.

When you speak of movies, Hollywood usually comes to mind, not Fort Lee, New Jersey

The bank is one of the few structures that remains from the borough’s silent-film days, where apartment buildings, car parks, convenience stores and rampant reconstruction have since usurped colonial-style mansions and movie studios. But you can still take a stroll through downtown’s Monument Park, where actor-turned-director Griffith shot early films such as 1909’s The Cord of Life and Harley Knowles directed 1917’s The Volunteer. Or snap some pics outside Rambo’s, a former two-storey saloon along First Street in the borough’s residential Coytesville neighbourhood that is now government-assisted housing for veterans. In the early days of film, Rambo’s stood in for everything from a New England tavern to a Western saloon – and later earned the nickname the ‘Silicon Valley of Film’ from Meyers and his colleagues for being an incubator of early film ideas. “Crew from every film studio came here because it was the only game in town for lunch,” Meyers said. “They sat in Rambo’s outdoor picnic area and came up with innovative new ways to do things, like diffusing light by holding a tablecloth up to the sun.”

Of course, there’s also Cliffhanger Point, that natural overhang that Pearl White and her own crew made famous. “For years I never knew where that sight was,” Nelson said, “but when we finally found it, it was so obvious. You could actually line up the cracks in the rock.]

When it comes down to it, Fort Lee’s days of movie stardom may have been a flash in the pan, but the town’s role in the history of film is unmistakable. “This is the place that pioneered film studios,” Meyers said. “The studios and many of their films may be gone, but their ghosts undoubtedly remain.”

They’re simply lurking behind high-rises and 24-hour Korean eateries.

Daily Mail.com: America's First Film Town

The small New Jersey outpost across the river from Manhattan that pre-dated the glamour of Hollywood as the center of the film industry

• Before Hollywood, Fort Lee, New Jersey, was the first-ever film town in the 1910s, at the birth of the motion picture industry

• By 1915 a high concentration of film studios had gathered in the New Jersey borough, including the original Universal Studios, the American branch of the French Éclair Studios and the Solax Company

• The proximity to New York City and the diverse landscapes ranging from open fields to rural neighborhood streets to the cliffs of the Palisades made Fort Lee an ideal location for the brand-new film industry

• By 1918, however, changing circumstances including America's involvement in the First World War and the 1918 influenza epidemic disrupted the film industry in Fort Lee

• Studios closed their doors in the small town and moved out to Hollywood, leaving Fort Lee practically abandoned and forgotten

• A new documentary about Fort Lee, The Champion: A Story of America's First Film Town, has just been nominated for a New York Emmy

• The film follows the story of Fort Lee's first film studio, the Champion Studio, which was built in 1910

By ANN SCHMIDT FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 12:12 EDT, 7 March 2018 | UPDATED: 12:13 EDT, 7 March 2018

When Tom Meyers thinks of growing up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, he always goes back to the summer of 1971 when he was 10 years old. He and his friends would go to Gus Becker's Saloon on First Street where the owner, in his late 80s, would give the boys sodas and tell them about bartending in the 1910s, when Fort Lee was crawling with movie actors, crew members, directors and producers.

Meyers remembers a poster of Florence Lawrence, the first American movie star, on the wall. Lawrence personally signed the poster to Becker who told the boys about her, the actress Pearl White and the acting family, the Barrymores, who all shot and worked – and in the case of the Barrymores lived – in Fort Lee.

The New Jersey borough just across the Hudson River from New York City became the first American film town in the 1910s when a concentration of film studios operated all within a few blocks of each other, producing thousands of silent films. At its height in the mid-1910s, the town had 11 working studios including Fox Film Corporation, the Goldwyn Picture Corporation, Éclair Studios and The Solax Company.

By 1918 however, changing circumstances were disrupting the film industry, particularly in Fort Lee. With the United States' entrance into the First World War in 1917, the 1918 influenza pandemic and the frozen-over Hudson River in 1918, many of the East Coast studios shut their doors and moved out west to Hollywood, leaving Fort Lee mostly deserted with empty lots and abandoned studios.

Despite two short documentaries about the borough, one made in 1935 and the other in 1964, Fort Lee's film history was mostly forgotten in the wake of Hollywood. Its history wasn't even taught in Fort Lee itself, Meyers says. Instead, he learned about it from his parents and grandparents, who had worked in the industry, and from Becker.

Fort Lee, New Jersey, was the first-ever film town in America in the 1910s, even before Hollywood. At its height, the small New Jersey borough across the Hudson River from upper Manhattan had 11 working studios in close proximity to one another. Pictured is America's first named movie star, Florence Lawrence, on a film set

Studios were drawn to Fort Lee as the perfect place to shoot a variety of films because of the wide range of landscapes. The borough had open fields, quiet residential streets and the cliffs of the Palisades. Starting in 1907, the first New York City-based studios were taking day trips to Fort Lee for filming. Pictured is a still from an unknown Western made by the Champion Studio and shot in Fort Lee

Fort Lee's history has been brought back to the light, however, with the release of a documentary which has just been nominated for a New York Emmy. The Champion: A Story of America's First Film Town was produced by the Fort Lee Film Commission, of which Tom Meyers is the executive director and founder. 

The 30-minute documentary follows the story of the Champion Studio, Fort Lee's first film studio founded by Mark Dintenfass in 1910. When the Fort Lee Film Commission started the project in 2013, the studio had just been sold and was in danger of being demolished. As much as commission tried to preserve the historic building, it was torn down that same year.

After it was demolished, the scope of the documentary changed. The project was no longer just about the studio, it became about 'trying to save American film history. It told a story wrapped around Fort Lee as the first American film town', Meyers says.

'This is what happens when you don't care for this history,' Meyers tells DailyMail.com about the demolished Champion studio. 'What should have happened there, that could have been a jewel of a building, converted into a place for new filmmakers to learn their craft, like student filmmakers, young people. Right now it's still an empty lot.'

Though film studios were taking day trips to Fort Lee starting in 1907, the Champion Studio (pictured during its construction in 1910), was the first studio to set up shop directly in Fort Lee

The Champion studio (pictured from the 1964 documentary Before Hollywood There Was Fort Lee, NJ) was also one of the last studios to remain in Fort Lee. In 1923, it was sold and turned into a printing plant, which it remained as until it was sold again and demolished in 2013

Though the history of Fort Lee as a film town has been largely forgotten in the shadow of Hollywood, a new documentary about the borough has been released. The Champion: A Story of America's First Film Town was even nominated for a New York Emmy

Fort Lee, named after General Charles Lee by George Washington during the Revolutionary War, is across the Hudson River – and today the George Washington Bridge – from upper Manhattan. After the Civil War it became something of a resort town and by the late 19th century the Palisades Amusement Park in Fort Lee and Cliffside Park, New Jersey, brought even more visitors.

About 30 miles away in West Orange, New Jersey, the American motion picture was born. Thomas Edison built the first film studio, the 'Black Maria' in 1893 and he patented the first motion picture camera in 1897. Though it is often overshadowed by Hollywood, Meyers says this history should not be forgotten.

'All of that happened in the state of New Jersey,' he says. 'It wasn't California, it wasn't New York. This was the state of New Jersey.'

However, production companies did spring up in New York City, filming the short, silent films that were popular at the time inside their brownstone studios on 14th street, or on the roof for exterior shots. By 1907, some studios had discovered Fort Lee as a good place for filming with its dirt roads, residential streets lined with clapboard houses, open fields and the cliffs of the Palisades, all perfect for a wide range of films.

Gus Becker's Saloon, which was then known as Rambo's Saloon, played a huge part in the industry. It was the perfect hangout for actors and crew members when they had finished filming and the upstairs was often used for a dressing room for actors. The saloon itself starred in hundreds of films, its porch easily arranged for different sets.

Because of Fort Lee's close proximity to the city – just a hop, skip and a jump via the new subway system and a ferry across the Hudson – it became the perfect place for filming day trips. It also helped that filming in Fort Lee made it more difficult for Edison's patent detectives to follow independent filmmakers and gather information in order to charge licensing fees for the use of cameras, film and projectors.

The 30-minute documentary follows the story of the Champion Studio within the larger context of Fort Lee and the earliest years of the film industry. Pictured left is a movie poster for All For Love, which was made in Fort Lee by Victor Studio, which had combined with the Champion Studio. Both studios were among those who had been folded into the Universal Film Manufacturing Company in 1912. Pictured right is a scene from the 1911 short, silent film How He Redeemed Himself, produced by Champion Studio and shot in Fort Lee

Pictured is a still from the 1911 short silent film In the Great Big West, produced by Champion Studio and shot in Fort Lee. The film is about a young doctor named Harold Walters who is in love with Dorothy Desmond, but conflicts between his love for her and his duties as a physician

Mark Dintenfass (pictured) was the first to set up his studio, Champion Studio, actually in Fort Lee. He had gotten his start in film producing in New York City, but was put out of business there because of licensing fees put on by Thomas Edison who had the patent for the first moving picture camera

Though Mark Dintenfass had started producing films in New York City, the fees put him out of business, so he decided to set up his company just beside Fort Lee, in the town of Englewood Cliffs. His studio, the Champion Studio, was the 'first permanent motion picture studio to be built in the Fort Lee area', film scholar, Rutgers professor and Fort Lee Film Commission member Richard Koszarski says in the documentary. It was built in 1910 and by the end of 1911, two other studios had already followed suit and set themselves up in Fort Lee.

'It's this concentration,' Koszarski tells DailyMail.com. 'It's what we call the film town, or the phrase that's used is the birth of the American film industry. Now, there were studios around the country before they started building studios in Fort Lee. There were studios in Brooklyn, downtown Manhattan, Philadelphia. What you have in Fort Lee is this concentration. They are packed together. Within one block you'll have three different companies operating studios, which means that you also have around it all the support equipment. You can walk, literally, down the street to your choice of film laboratories.

'That concentration, we think of Hollywood, the concentration of studios. And it wasn't just a coincidence, it was useful for the studios to be together because, so they could interact. But that happened earlier and in an even more compact way in Fort Lee... There was a lot of this cooperation and people could learn from one another. It's a good thing to have a concentration of an art industry like that.'

Companies including the American branch of the French Éclair Studios, the Solax Company, the Willat Film Manufacturing Company, the Peerless-World Studio and Paragon Studio had brought themselves to Fort Lee in the 1910s, and others including Victor Studios and Goldwyn Pictures were founded in Fort Lee, making it the first-ever American film town.

To stay afloat in the midst of the intense competition between studios, Dintenfass and other smaller independent studio heads joined together into the Universal Film Manufacturing Company in 1912, which bought The Champion and kept Dintenfass on as the manager.

Pictured is a still from the restored 1912 short film Robin Hood, the earliest surviving film version of the story, which was shot in Fort Lee by Solax Studio and directed by Étienne Arnaud

One of the most frequently used sets in Fort Lee films was Rambo's Saloon, which started as a hangout for actors and crew members after a long day of filming. Its upstairs floor became the perfect place for actors' dressing rooms and because the porch could be easily arranged for different sets, the saloon itself starred in hundreds of films. Pictured is Florence Lawrence in her dressing room

Before the Champion documentary came out last year, there were two other attempts to remember the history of Fort Lee. Ghost Town: The Story of Fort Lee was created in 1935 by Theodore Huff and Mark A Borgatta. Before Hollywood There Was Fort Lee, NJ was created in 1964, directed by Thomas Hanlon

As the first film town, Fort Lee was a center of progress. Filming techniques and technologies were advancing and women were given empowering roles. Actress Pearl White was the star of the adventure film serial, The Perils of Pauline, which showed her riding horses and climbing the Palisades cliffs. Alice Guy-Blaché was the first female film director and studio owner of Solax, which she had built in 1912. She produced thousands of films in her career.

However, by 1918 things were changing for the film industry and Fort Lee. Because of restrictions put in place when the US joined World War I in 1917, East Coast studios would have days without electricity, which prevented them from filming without lights. Meanwhile, the constant sunshine in Hollywood meant West Coast studios didn't need constant lighting. When the influenza pandemic hit the United States in 1918, it started in the East Coast, giving studios another excuse to shut their doors – though it ended up following them west.

But one of the final problems for Fort Lee specifically was that in the winter of 1918, the Hudson River froze, cutting off the only transportation between Fort Lee and New York City: the ferry. The George Washington Bridge, which connects the two today, wasn't completed until 1931.

Koszarski says the East Coast studio owners decided to 'temporarily' close their doors and just focus on Hollywood for a while before returning, 'but then it was really easy to say, well we won't open them again', though he adds they did end up coming back, just not to Fort Lee.

'A number of the companies said, we already have studios on the West Coast and the East Coast, let's just forget about this East Coast thing. Too many problems,' he says. 'Immediately, they realized that was not a perfect solution. So as soon as the war ended, they began to build new studios in the east, but not in New Jersey, because there was no bridge to New Jersey.'

Pictured is an ad for a Goldwyn Pictures film, The Danger Game, released in 1918. Goldwyn Pictures had their studio in Fort Lee. The Danger Game, starring Madge Kennedy in the leading role, is a 'melodramatic comedy' and is included in the DVD set with the 2017 documentary The Champion

Florence Lawrence (painting left and a 1908 portrait right) was a Canadian-American actress and the first movie star. She was at the height of her fame in the 1910s, starring as the leading lady in many silent films shot in Fort Lee. She starred in almost 300 films during her career

Fort Lee stayed relatively quiet after the studios left in the 1920s, with the exception of African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, who rented out Fort Lee studios in the '20s and '30s at a time when he wouldn't have been able to shoot in Hollywood. He is considered the first major African American feature filmmaker, who produced both silent and sound films.

Other than Micheaux and other independent filmmakers renting out those spaces, the abandoned industrial properties and empty studio lots remained up until the 1940s and '50s, Koszarski says, though some were used for Broadway company warehouses. Laboratories and film storage warehouses did remain in Fort Lee, fully operational and employing the residents of the borough.

'That was kind of your back office business,' Koszarski says. 'But it employed lots of people. It didn't employ fancy movie stars or directors, so it gets written out of film history.'

Another film included in The Champion documentary DVD set is The Indian Land Grab, a 1910 short Western shot in Fort Lee

The borough only really came back into the limelight in 2013 with the Bridgegate scandal where toll lanes on the upper level of the George Washington Bridge were intentionally closed by political appointees of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. But as far as film history, Fort Lee is hardly, if ever, mentioned. Part of that can be attributed to a stylistic change, Koszarski says, which happened around 1918 and made it so that films made before 1918 weren't preserved.

'The style of making films changed,' he says. 'So that films from before 1918 suddenly seemed very old and early. And films made after 1918, even though they may be silent films, still seemed to work like "real movies". So people who were stars before 1918 or directors, the careers, they just went into a black hole.'

The loss of Fort Lee's history also comes down to the fact that Hollywood was just better at promoting itself.

'Hollywood has a much more successful promotional machine,' he says. 'Hollywood had a Chamber of Commerce that promoted itself as the center of the film universe. That this is where all films are made. And they began doing that in the late teens and early '20s and as far as New York was concerned, New York, you know, would sort of look down on this as just like crazy entertainment business... And in Fort Lee, it was a residential community. They were almost happy to see these noisy industries leave. Of course they took the jobs with them. So it was very easy to write it out.'

He adds: 'And unfortunately, there's a huge amount of the product that has just vanished. We don't have it anymore so that even historians can't dig out old films.'

To stay afloat in the midst of the intense competition between studios, Dintenfass and other smaller independent studio heads joined together into the Universal Film Manufacturing Company in 1912, which bought The Champion and kept Dintenfass on as the manager. Pictured is a Universal Set from 1912

When Tom Meyers was growing up in Fort Lee in the early 1970s, he says he and his friends used to go to Gus Becker's Saloon - what used to be Rambo's Saloon - after school. Meyers says Becker, the owner who was in his late 80s at the time, would tell them all about bartending in the 1910s when the film industry was still big in Fort Lee. Becker even had a poster of Florence Lawrence (pictured) on the wall that she had personally signed to Becker

Back in 2013 Meyers heard that Rambo's Saloon was going to be demolished, so he and the Fort Lee Film Commission, which he founded in 2000, worked with the Fort Lee Mayor and Council to prevent that from happening. They were able to arrange for the house to be turned into affordable housing for veterans and their families, while still maintaining the exterior of the building.

Around the same time, there was also word that the Champion studio had been sold and was going to be demolished. Unlike Rambo's, the Champion was in Englewood Cliffs, where the mayor and city council were less interested in preserving the space. The Champion had been sold by Universal in 1923 to a printing plant, which is what it continued to be until 2013 when it was sold and demolished.

Its demolition is what prompted the commission to create The Champion documentary based on Koszarski's 2004 book Fort Lee: The Film Town. The documentary was released in a DVD set in October, which includes the 1935 documentary about Fort Lee called Ghost Town: The Story of Fort Lee as well as eight silent films produced in the borough from 1910 to 1918. 

Koszarski says the documentary isn't necessarily about just the Champion Studio so much as it is about the importance of taking care of history.

'The Champion documentary is not just important because we said oh here was this studio, this rather small and even in the context of Fort Lee, insignificant studio,' he says. 'It's because the documentary is about trying to save history and reminding people that film history is not just something that comes in a can on reel, but film history also is cultural and there are physical archaeological traces around us.

'It's kind of a reminder that even for a little studio, it did have some firsts. It was probably the first one built out here and so on. I can't, and the movie doesn't, make the argument that they were making the best films, even in Fort Lee. But they were making films… but at least you had this trace, this archaeological trace and then the archaeological trace is gone.' 

After the 1920s, Fort Lee stayed relatively quiet and the closed up studios remained mostly unused with the exception of a few independent filmmakers and African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, who is considered the first major African American feature filmmaker and produced both silent and sound films. He rented studios in Fort Lee in the '20s and '30s at a time when he wouldn't have been able to shoot films in Hollywood. Pictured is a still from his 1920 film The Symbol of the Unconquered

Iris Hall (pictured) starred in the silent film. This scene of the film was shot on the side of the Champion Studio (in the background). The Symbol of the Unconquered is the last time the Champion Studio is pictured in a film

For Marc Perez, the director of the documentary, a member of the Fort Lee Film Commission and someone who grew up in Fort Lee as a child, the more he worked on the film, the more passionate he was about it.

'Filmmaking is an art form,' he tells DailyMail.com. 'That's still really new when you compare it to everything else, music painting and sculpture and all these things. It's really like a baby compared to all that and I don't think people yet understand that these short films made in 1915 were a piece of art. Nobody knew what they were doing and they figured out how to tell a story with this technology, but I don't know if [people] understand that it needs to be preserved today or else the film gets disintegrated, it goes away... It's really unappreciated right now. And I think just more of this kind of stuff is needed to appreciate.'  

Despite the loss of the Champion Studio building and the years of its forgotten film history, the Meyers and the commission are working to create a space for film to have a future in Fort Lee. Back in 2001, the Fort Lee Film Commission attempted to save the historic Barrymore House, where the American acting family had lived. Though the house was demolished, the commission plans to open the Barrymore Film Center in 2019, which will have a film museum and a 260-seat cinema where they plan to showcase classic films, art house films and student films.

'We want this to be not just about Fort Lee, although that'll be the anchor,' Meyers says. 'But truly make this really a place where American cinema has a home, the history of American cinema and the future of American cinema and give that through a perspective of world cinema.

'It's going to be a lot of diverse programming and all of this really comes out of the rubble of the Champion Studio. So out of that loss, we're going to enshrine the memory of the Champion and tell that story to future generations in this film center. And we hope that'll help preserve what history has left, not only in Fort Lee, but around the country.'

New York Times: You Know These 20 Movies. Now Meet the Women Behind Them

Lupino and Collins aren’t mentioned in the same breath as Scorsese and
Spike Lee, but they should be. Let’s put them back in the conversation.

By MANOHLA DARGIS and A.O. SCOTT SEPT. 20, 2018

This season will bring a number of female-driven movies, including new work from Nicole Holofcener, Karyn Kusama and other directors who just might be poised for a breakthrough. These films are reminders that even as female activists continue to demand industry reform post-Harvey Weinstein, women — much as they have always done — are also working hard as writers, directors, producers and costume designers.

Women have been on the cinematic front lines from the start. While men took most of the credit for building the movie industry, women — on camera and off, in the executives suites and far from Hollywood — were busily, thrillingly, building it, too. That’s the reason for our list of Movie Women You Should Know, which is not a canon or a pantheon but a celebration and an invitation to further discovery. Here are some of the art’s other pioneers — its independents and entrepreneurs, auteurs and artisans.

ANITA LOOS

She Wrote the Book on Screenwriting

“How to Write Photoplays,” 1920

One of the most prolific and powerful screenwriters of her time — with a career that began in 1912 and stretched into the late ’50s — Anita Loos was in some ways bigger than Hollywood itself. She brought the clout and cachet of a best-selling novelist and successful Broadway playwright to the nascent movie industry, adapting her own work and those of her peers to the new medium. In 1920 she and her husband, John Emerson, published “How to Write Photoplays,” an early example of an enduring genre. This manual for aspiring movie scribes included a wealth of advice both practical (“Writing for the Camera,” “Marketing the Story”) and existential:

Above all things the scenario writer should keep alive. Just keep yourself with lively, laughing, thinking people, think about things yourself, and cultivate a respect for new ideas of any kind. Take care of these small ideas and the big plots will take care of themselves.

Good advice, then and now, and revealing of Loos’s own approach. She was protean and prolific — her credits range from D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” (1916) to George Cukor’s “The Women” (1939) — sociable and shrewd. “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” her best-seller from 1925, was brought to the screen first in 1928 and then, as a musical, in 1953, with Marilyn Monroe singing about diamonds and Anita Loos laughing all the way to the bank. (A.O. Scott)

➞ Loos wrote in a memoir that “in its heyday, Hollywood reflected, if it did not actually produce, the sexual climate of our land.” She could almost have written that sentence with “I” in place of the word “Hollywood.”

MARION E. WONG

She Directed the First
Chinese-American Film

“The Curse of Quon Gwon,” 1916-17

In July 1917, the magazine the Moving Picture World ran a brief story on the Mandarin Film Company accompanied by a photo of its president, the Chinese-American filmmaker Marion E. Wong. Based in Oakland, Calif. — a source of independent cinema even then — the company, the item read, had recently completed its first film, “The Curse of Quon Gwon” and was expected “to continue the production of films dealing with Chinese subjects.” It was “the only Chinese producing concern in this country.”

“The Curse of Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles With the West,” as it is fully titled, proved to be Wong’s only film. The earliest known movie by a Chinese-American filmmaker, it was long thought lost until the director Arthur Dong happened upon some surviving material while making his 2007 documentary “Hollywood Chinese.” Even in its current truncated form, Wong’s film beguiles partly because of its melodrama — a young couple, a lonely bride, cultural dissonance, the promised misfortune — and because of flourishes of beauty, like the image of a woman gazing into a mirror before her life is cleaved in two. (Manohla Dargis)

DEDE ALLEN

She Edited Gangsters So They Flew

“Bonnie and Clyde,” 1967

“Make it go faster.” That’s what the director Arthur Penn told Dede Allen when she was editing “Bonnie and Clyde.” She did, brilliantly. Over a decades-long career, she edited six films by Penn, who saw her as a true collaborator, calling Allen “an artist” and an “essential part of the creative process.” She worked hard, memorizing every frame until the footage ran in her head. Likening herself to the actors, Allen said she, too, became the roles to “viscerally, emotionally feel the way the characters feel.”

Dede Allen Associated Press

Like all of filmmaking, editing was wide open to women in cinema’s earliest years. By the 1920s, though, the regimented studio system had become divided along gender roles. Although some women had lengthy careers as studio cutters, by the late 1930s, as Allen once said, “it was not considered proper for a girl to come in and take a job from a father with children.” She and her husband moved to New York, where she edited her first notable feature in 1959 and in time helped filmmakers revolutionize the art by turning editing into energy, feeling, character. (M.D.)

➞ Director Arthur Penn wanted to give “Bonnie and Clyde” all “this energy” Allen said. “We were able to go in with angles and close-ups and only pull back when we wanted to show what Arthur called ‘the tapestry,’” she explained, adding “I broke many of my hard and fast rules about story, character and how a scene plays.”

ALICE GUY BLACHÉ

She Was the First Woman
in the Director’s Chair

“The Cabbage Fairy,” 1896

Alice Guy Blaché helped invent cinema as we know it. The first female filmmaker and among the first to make a fiction film, she made her debut in 1896 with the one-minute “The Cabbage Fairy.” She shot this charmer — which shows a sprite smilingly plucking real babies from a cabbage patch — on a Paris patio while working as a secretary for Gaumont, which would soon be a film powerhouse. Historians ignored and even rejected that date perhaps, as the theorist Jane M. Gaines has suggested, it was unthinkable that a young female secretary supporting a widowed mother could be responsible for an early-cinema milestone.

Guy Blaché is thought to have made some 1,000 films (mostly shorts) that included cowboy flicks, cross-dressing comedies and melodramas; about 150 had synchronized sound (this was before the industry widely embraced sound). She founded a film company, Solax, and built a studio in Fort Lee, N.J., where she hung a banner for her actors that read, “Be Natural.” Her last film was released in 1920 and then she was forgotten until scholars began to realize that she had been there all along. (M.D.)

BARBARA LODEN

She Had It With Men and
Made a Film About It

“Wanda,” 1970

“Wanda,” the only feature Barbara Loden directed — she was not yet 50 when she died, in 1980 — is a movie both of and ahead of its time. Like many American films of its time, “Wanda,” made in 1970, is the story of an earnest quest for freedom set in a vividly naturalistic American landscape. But most of the rebels and seekers of the New Hollywood were men, heirs of Huck Finn in flight from social conventions and, as often as not, the demands of women.

Wanda Goronski, played by Loden herself, tells a different story. An unhappy housewife in Pennsylvania’s coal country — where Loden grew up — her prospects are defined, thwarted and betrayed by men. There is a blunt, brutal matter-of-factness in the way Loden portrays Wanda’s fate as she leaves her husband and drifts through problematic love affairs. There is also a quiet and insistent empathy.

Before turning to writing and directing, Loden appeared in “Wild River” and “Splendor in the Grass,” both directed by Elia Kazan, whom she married in 1967. The vaunted realism of Kazan’s films can seem downright sentimental compared with “Wanda,” which has an honesty about marriage, work, sex and class that still feels radical and raw. (A.O.S.)

LEIGH BRACKETT

She Scripted Hard-Boiled Men

“The Big Sleep,” 1946

“She wrote that like a man” — this was the gruff praise that the director Howard Hawks bestowed on the screenwriter Leigh Brackett’s work on “The Big Sleep.” They met because Hawks had been looking for someone who could help turn the Raymond Chandler novel into a film for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Hawks thought Brackett had the right strong stuff after reading one of her crime novels. “He was somewhat shaken,” she said later, “when he discovered that it was Miss and not Mr. Brackett.”

Brackett was 28 when Hawks brought her in to write “The Big Sleep” along with William Faulkner. “He was wonderful on construction,” she said of Faulkner, “but just couldn’t write lines an actor could speak.” A prolific science-fiction author, Brackett kept writing scripts — notably Hawks’s “Rio Bravo” — and turned in the first draft of “The Empire Strikes Back” just before she died at age 62 in 1978. (M.D.)

IDA LUPINO

She Gave Noir Its Emotion

“Outrage,” 1950

“I don’t want to smile all the time,” Ida Lupino said in 1942. She was 24 and under contract at Warner Bros., which wanted her to be another Bette Davis. Reluctant to take Davis’s seconds, Lupino had signed a strategic short contract with the studio that allowed her to work elsewhere. She went on to make great films at Warners, but there were bad roles, too, and frustration. By 1949, she was ready to be truly independent, citing the neorealist director Roberto Rossellini as inspiration. “When are you going to make pictures about ordinary people in ordinary situations?” he had asked her.

Lupino answered by founding a company, The Filmmakers, with her husband and one other. They were set to shoot their first film, “Not Wanted” — about an unwed mother — when its director fell ill. Lupino discreetly took over. Lupino kept on calling the shots, and for decades was the only female director in Hollywood. Working with low budgets and sometimes uneven casts, she turned sensation into emotion in lean, tense, tough films like “Outrage,” a shadow-strafed noir about a young woman who, after she is raped, is forced to find herself. (M.D.)

LOTTE REINIGER

She Was the Anti-Disney

“The Adventures of Prince Achmed,” 1926

More than a decade before Walt Disney released “Snow White” — often cited as the first animated feature — the German animator Lotte Reiniger completed “The Adventures of Prince Achmed,” which used hand-cut paper silhouettes photographed against a tinted background to tell a fanciful story of enchantment and danger. Like Disney, Reiniger mined the canon of European fairy tales to provide entertainment for children, completing more than 70 films, including versions of “Puss in Boots,” “Hansel and Gretel” and “Cinderella” in a career that began during World War I and lasted until 1980.

Lotte Reiniger working on silhouettes for “Prince Achmed.” ullstein bild/Getty Images

In Berlin in the 1920s, Reiniger was part of an international circle of artists and intellectuals that included Bertolt Brecht and Jean Renoir. She made a handful of live-action films and a series of short sound movies based on operas and classical music. Most of that work is lost, but “Prince Achmed” and the silent shorts that survive testify to the power of her technique, a haunting, painstaking and expressive form of animation with roots in ancient puppetry and shadow theater. Reiniger herself wielded the scissors, fashioning intricate backgrounds and figures that float in blue or pink light, at once eerily timeless and strikingly modern. Her blend of whimsy and spookiness, the dreamy images that seem to tap right into the collective unconscious suggest both an antidote to Disney and a precursor to Tim Burton. (A.O.S.)

MARY BLAIR

She Put Color in Disney’s World

“Alice in Wonderland,” 1951

Mary Blair around 1941 Estate of Mary Blair, via the Walt Disney Family Museum

“Walt said that I knew about colors he had never heard of before.”

Like many women, Mary Blair has too often been relegated to the margins in a great man’s biography, despite bringing wonder and ravishing color to Walt Disney’s world. Born in 1911, Blair began working for Disney reluctantly (her word) in 1940 as a sketch artist. She might have hesitated because she had trained as a fine artist, but she also may have known that at Disney most women worked in the ink and paint department (dubbed “the nunnery”), translating the male animators’ drawings onto celluloid.

A scene from “Alice in Wonderland” Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment

Blair soon branched out. She helped the writers for “Dumbo,” as she put it, “create the ideas of the picture graphically right from its basic beginning.” In time, she was such a major influence on Disney himself that the historian John Canemaker argued that “the stylishness and vibrant color” of the studio’s films from the early 1940s through the mid-1950s — including the at times eye-poppingly trippy “Alice in Wonderland” — came from Blair. Her flat modernist aesthetic didn’t fit the studio’s soft three-dimensional realism, but her extraordinary colors and concepts influenced its films, including “Cinderella” and “Peter Pan.” (M.D.)

➞ Marc Davis, one of the legendary Disney animators known as the Nine Old Men, said Blair “spent most of her life misunderstood.” Her male colleagues, he said, based their designs on perspective, while Blair “did things on marvelous flat panels,” work that “tragically” never got to the screen.

EDITH HEAD

She Dressed Hollywood for Success

“All About Eve,” 1950

Costume designers are visible almost solely through their work, but Edith Head was an exception. A celebrity in her own right — and the author of a rigorous and highly practical 1967 “How to Dress for Success” manual — she was recognizable for her signature blue-tinted glasses, diminutive stature and dark, straight bangs. She was the inspiration for Edna Mode in Pixar’s “Incredibles” films.

But first, and more importantly, she inspired generations of men and women with dreams of glamour. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Head — along with her chief rival, the equally prolific Irene Sharaff — taught postwar moviegoers how to appreciate the seductive and semiotic power of clothes.

Bette Davis and Gary Merrill in “All About Eve.” 20th Century Fox/Kobal Collection

Head was nominated for 35 Oscars and won eight. Two of those came in a single year, 1951, when separate costume design awards were given for color and black-and-white films and Head won both: for the soigné Manhattan elegance of Joseph Mankiewicz’s “All About Eve” and for the sword-and-sandals proto-camp of Cecil B. DeMille’s “Samson and Delilah.” What you remember most are the two leading ladies, Bette Davis and Hedy Lamarr. They dressed not only for success but for power, grace, guile and immortality, too. (A.O.S.)

SONYA LEVIEN

She Took the Shtetl to Hollywood

“Salome of the Tenements,” 1925

“Salome of the Tenements,” a melodrama from 1925, is one of thousands of “lost films” of the silent era. Luckily, its source material, Anzia Yezierska’s novel, is still around, offering insight into the life of its screenwriter, Sonya Levien.

“Salome” is a feminist potboiler, a tale of enterprise and upward mobility that follows Sonya Mendel from sweatshop seamstress to prosperous fashion designer. Levien, born Sonya Opesken in Russia in 1888, was not exactly like her fictional namesake, but her journey from shtetl to slum to the studio lots of Hollywood — where she became one of the most in-demand screenwriters of her time — stands as a quintessential early-20th-century American story.

After the 1920s vogue for immigrant stories faded, Levien applied her talents to musicals, westerns and historical epics. Among her many credits are all three versions of “State Fair.” That movie, in its nonmusical (1933) and musical (1945 and 1962) incarnations, is a hearty helping of Iowa corn. That it’s served up partly by a daughter of Ukraine and the Lower East Side is testimony to the endlessly adaptable talents of Sonya Levien. (A.O.S.)

KATHLEEN COLLINS

She Put the Brains in the Rom-Com

“Losing Ground,” 1982

Death robbed us too early of Kathleen Collins, a short-story writer, playwright and filmmaker who was just 46 when she died in 1988. Even so, there is much to rejoice about what she left behind, notably “Losing Ground.” A sui generis film that’s part existential rom-com, part philosophical argument, it tracks Sara (Seret Scott), a charmingly self-serious professor who’s trying to get an intellectual handle on what she terms “ecstatic experience” while her freewheeling artist husband (Bill Gunn) pursues his own understanding. (She needs to get out of her head and into her body.)

The radicalness of “Losing Ground” endures. It takes intellectual and aesthetic inquiries as seriously (and as sexily) as a European art film (Collins admired Eric Rohmer), which must have baffled distributors who had ideas about what constituted a black film: “Losing Ground” played at festivals but was never theatrically released in her lifetime. “My private audience is black people,” Collins said. “I don’t write for anybody else. But I don’t write for them in a political sense, I write for them out of my image memory because my image memory is full of black people. I write for my aunts, my cousins.” (M.D.)

FRANCES FLAHERTY

She Shaped Fact Into Film

“Moana,” 1926

There is an astonishing passage in Frances Flaherty’s diary from 1915 in which she writes about the life she hoped to have with her husband, Robert Flaherty, the pioneering documentarian. She dreamed they would set off together on a great adventure and experience a “rare relationship, a wonderful passionate partnership.” Fate intervened, or perhaps pragmatism, after she became pregnant. Before her dream began, she knew she had to turn back and that, as he set off, “it was too truly a parting of the ways.”

Lupenga and Fa’angase as seen in “Moana.” Frances Hubbard Flaherty/Kino Lorber

Yet a remarkable partnership did endure. Frances collaborated on the films for which her husband is known, including “Moana,” a lush, romantic fiction-documentary hybrid shot in Samoa. After his death, she helped burnish his legend through her writings and the creation of the nonprofit Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. To read her early diaries, though, is to grasp that Frances didn’t only help turn her husband into a legend but also a filmmaker: In 1916, she wrote that she had “decided beyond doubt now in my own mind” that Robert needed to focus on his next film, one that he began shooting in 1920 and titled “Nanook of the North.” (M.D.)

SHIRLEY CLARKE

She Made Documentaries Lyrical

“Portrait of Jason,” 1967

Shirley Clarke directed an Oscar-winning film, but no one would mistake her for a member of the Hollywood establishment. She placed herself in the aesthetic lineage of Italian neorealism, and while many of her films can be classified as documentaries, her tough, lyrical insights into the lives of real people transform the journalistic implications of that label. By the same token, her scripted features have the vivid immediacy and rough texture of life itself.

Clarke’s subjects — artists, musicians, gang members, drug addicts and perhaps most famously a gay hustler named Jason Holliday — were usually male and frequently African-American. But her films were nonetheless strongly personal, for reasons Clarke, who was white, explained once in an interview. “I identified with black people because I couldn’t deal with the woman question and I transposed it. I could understand very easily the black problems, and I somehow equated them to how I felt.” Her “Portrait of Jason” is thus also a self-portrait, an exploration of the subjectivity of the woman behind the camera as well as the man in front of it. (A.O.S.)

Jason Holliday in Clarke’s film. Milestone Film & Video

MARGARET BOOTH

She Edited Her Way to Power at MGM

“Mutiny on the Bounty,” 1935

In the old, pre-talkie days, the people who sliced and spliced silent film were called “cutters.” Early in the sound era, Irving Thalberg, the farseeing head of production at MGM, rechristened them “film editors,” a credit first bestowed upon, and quite possibly designed for, Margaret Booth.

Booth, who died in 2002 at 104, started out cutting negatives for D.W. Griffith, and went on to master the subtle rhythms of cinematic storytelling. “It’s like the pauses and breaths you take on the stage,” she said of her craft. “It has its ups and downs and its pace.” A pioneer in adapting silent-movie techniques to sound film, she was nominated for an Oscar for “Mutiny on the Bounty,” one of the biggest critical and commercial hits of 1935 and a groundbreaking blend of star power (Charles Laughton, Clark Gable and Franchot Tone), literary prestige and sophisticated action.

By that time Booth was established as one of the most powerful people at MGM in its heyday. According to the film historian Ally Acker, for three decades, no MGM film was released “without Booth’s approval.” In effect, she had final cut. (A.O.S.)

VIRGINIA VAN UPP

She Wrote Her Way to Power at Columbia

“Gilda,” 1946

In 1944, the Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn appointed Virginia Van Upp the studio’s executive producer, putting her in charge of its top pictures. She had already proved her value to Cohn by turning “Cover Girl” into a hit for Rita Hayworth, one of the studio’s biggest stars. Van Upp went on to do the same with “Gilda,” an indelible female-centric noir with a luminous Hayworth that Van Upp not only rewrote but also produced.

A former child actress, Van Upp had grown up in the industry, working in different areas before turning to writing, explaining her career choice to one interviewer simply: “What kind of a job can a woman hold after she has gray hair and is fat?” She was a hitmaker first for Paramount and then for Columbia, where she became the rare woman in charge in that era. “My only interest in producing,” she said, “is to have freedom as a writer.”

It wasn’t always easy. She told one of Cohn’s biographers that she had been forced to rebuff her boss, telling him that she wanted a clause in her new contract prohibiting him from committing “verbal rape.” He declined, but they apparently made their peace. Even so, Van Upp soon left Columbia, periodically returning to work even as her career faded out. (M.D.)

FRANCES MARION

She Helped Tough Guys Use Their Words

“The Big House,” 1930

There are movie legends and then there is Frances Marion, a legend’s legend. A 1925 ad for one of the films she wrote declared that she was “the greatest woman creative genius of the screen.” There was no need to qualify her achievement. She was one of the most powerful screenwriters in early Hollywood and, for a while, the highest paid of any gender.

Chester Morris and Wallace Beery in “The Big House.” Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Marion started as an actress but soon turned to writing in a career that saw the female-friendly industry become increasingly less welcoming to her sex. Her output was phenomenal — her biographer Cari Beauchamp credits her on 325 films — and included adaptations and original work. She’s closely associated with Mary Pickford (“The Poor Little Rich Girl”), but Marion also wrote the excellent prison drama, “The Big House” — she visited San Quentin to research it — starring a machine-gun toting Wallace Beery. With that film, she became the first female writer to win an Oscar; two years later, she picked up more gold for the tear-stained boxing film “The Champ.”

The title of her Hollywood memoir — wittily, fittingly — is “Off With Their Heads.” (M.D.)

VERA CHYTILOVA

She Rebelled in the Cold War

“Daisies,” 1966

Two young women — roommates at large in a big city, with high spirits and low expectation — challenge propriety, men and their own imaginations. They are both named Marie, and their friendship proves stronger than the pull of rules, responsibilities or romance.

Ivana Karbanova in “Daisies.” Criterion Collection

A further summary of Vera Chytilova’s “Daisies,” made with slender means and wild ambitions, is not really possible. It’s one of the great films of the Czech New Wave, a movement that was, like other new waves, largely a boy’s rebellion. After the Soviet invasion of 1968, Chytilova had difficulty making films, returning to form in the ’70s with a run of documentaries, historical films, dramas and comedies. After the fall of communism, her earlier films were rediscovered, and “Daisies” has taken its place among the essential movies of the ’60s, a bolt of liberatory lightning that illuminates future possibilities. (A.O.S.)

MAYA DEREN

She Invented American Experimental Film

“Meshes of the Afternoon,” 1943

“Experimental film” can sometimes seem like a phrase in search of a definition. But at least in America its parentage is not in doubt. Whatever experimental film might be, Maya Deren is its mother and “Meshes of the Afternoon” is its founding text.

A 13-and-a-half-minute, 16-millimeter black-and-white suite of dreamlike images — including a shot of Deren leaning against a window pane that has achieved the status of an icon — “Meshes” was made in 1943 in Los Angeles, shortly after Deren, who was born in Kiev in 1917, had moved there with her second husband, the Czech filmmaker Alexander Hammid. For all its surreal imagery, the film also has a poignant documentary value, offering a glimpse of a place, a time and an artistic sensibility that seem at once vivid and elusive. (A.O.S.)

➞ Deren once told an interviewer that “the reason that I had not been a very good poet was because actually my mind worked in images which I had been trying to translate or describe in words; therefore, when I undertook cinema, I was relieved of the false step of translating image into words.”

HANNAH WEINSTEIN

She Gave People of Color Starring Roles

“Claudine,” 1974

“Claudine,” the story of a romance between a garbage collector and a single mother on welfare, is a potent, tender, unjustly neglected work of ’70s social realism. Starring Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones, and directed by John Berry, it was the first feature produced by Third World Films, a company founded by, among others, Ossie Davis, Rita Moreno and Hannah Weinstein. Its goals were “to train people of color for work in the film industry and to make feature films from a minority perspective.”

For Weinstein, “Claudine” was one of several points of intersection between movies and politics. Born in 1911, she worked on the campaigns of Fiorello H. La Guardia and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among others. Part of the left-wing diaspora during the McCarthy era, she settled in London and started Sapphire Films, which produced scripts by blacklisted Hollywood writers, including series episodes written (under a pseudonym) by Ring Lardner Jr. Weinstein herself was designated a “concealed Communist” by the F.B.I.

Her activism continued until her death in 1984, and her further contributions to American movies included “Greased Lightning” and “Stir Crazy,” vehicles for Richard Pryor she produced. (A.O.S.)

NorthJersey.com: Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee will have a distinguished profile

Jim Beckerman, North Jersey Record

Published 6:37 p.m. ET May 28, 2019

Barrymore Film Center under construction in Fort Lee Tom Meyers, Tom Meyers

John Barrymore, famously, had the "great profile."

The Barrymore Film Center, half-completed on the corner of Fort Lee's Main Street and Park Avenue, has an unusual one.

Even on Tuesday morning, with just the naked beams in place, the building seemed modern and striking.

"The last girder I signed was on the Freedom Tower," remarked Fort Lee Mayor Mark J. Sokolich, lifted by elevator-scaffold to a high beam where, in the company of other dignitaries, he signed the girder with a Sharpie. "So excited. Mayor Mark Sokolich, 5-28-19."

Among the things not in place on Tuesday was the roof. Between the joists, rain fell intermittently.

"The happiness outweighs a couple of raindrops," said Councilwoman Ila Kasofsky, who also signed, along with a dozen others.

Tuesday's "high-beam signing ceremony" marks about the halfway point in a $15 million project that broke ground last October and is expected — if all goes well — to receive its first visitors in early October 2020.

"Art and culture have always been of paramount significance to Fort Lee, given our history," Sokolich said. "Quite frankly, this is the cherry on the sundae."

A combination 260-seat movie theater, museum and educational resource, the Barrymore Film Center promises to be as unusual as it looks. And it looks pretty unusual. 

Around the circumference of the 21,500-square-foot structure, designed by architect Hugh Hardy, a vaguely pyramidal shape flares out. "The veil," the center's promoters call it. 

"It points the way westward, toward Hollywood," said Nelson Page, president of the not-for-profit Friends of the Barrymore Film Center. 

"The exterior of the building is very futuristic," Page said.

The cultural center honors two enduring, and interconnected, legacies of Fort Lee.

One is the town's role in film history — as the Hollywood before Hollywood, where more than a dozen studios cranked out movies in the early 1900s.

The other is the Barrymore family — the famed acting clan, sired by Broadway star and Fort Lee resident Maurice Barrymore, which included sons John and Lionel, daughter Ethel, and John's granddaughter, Drew.

Lionel Barrymore you probably remember: He was the villainous Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life." Drew Barrymore you know from "E.T."

But even more celebrated, back in the day, were Ethel Barrymore, one of Broadway's most distinguished actresses (there's a Broadway theater named after her), and John Barrymore, the most famous Hamlet of his generation, widely held to be the most handsome man of stage or screen.

'The Royal Family'

Together, the three siblings — John, Ethel and Lionel — were Broadway royalty in the 1920s and '30s. They were lampooned, as such, when comic playwrights George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber painted them as a tribe of crazy egotists in a 1927 Broadway hit called — what else? —  "The Royal Family."

But John Barrymore, in the end, parodied himself better than anyone else could have. Toward the end of his career, he looked so sodden and sorry that a friend asked him if he was going to die.

"Die? I should say not," Barrymore is said to have replied. "No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him."

The Barrymores had a twofold connection to Fort Lee: Not only did their father have a house on Hammett Avenue in the Coytesville section (the children spent only intermittent years there), but John, Ethel and Lionel all made some of their earliest films in the town's studios. Naming the town's film center after them was a no-brainer.

But it's also a bittersweet victory for Tom Meyers, executive director of the Fort Lee Film Commission: He had tried unsuccessfully, back in 2001, to keep the Barrymore homestead from being razed.

"We came within one vote to save it," Meyers remembered. "But we lost the house. But the mayor, Jack Alter, said, 'The Barrymore name has magic in Fort Lee. Someday there will be a proper building to attach the name to.' We never forgot that."

The first exhibit in the center's museum space is expected to be "The Royal Family of Fort Lee: The Barrymores," which will include — among other treasures — the costume that John Barrymore wore in one of his signature stage roles, the villainous Richard III. It was one of many deformed monsters that Barrymore, profile or no profile, delighted in playing: Svengali, Captain Ahab and Mr. Hyde were others. 

"He wanted to play all kinds of roles, including roles that wouldn't accent his profile, but almost disguise it," Meyers said.

"The Royal Family" will be one of many rotating exhibits, most related to the movies, that are expected to cycle in and out of the center's 2,500-foot museum space every six months.

There also will be a permanent exhibit devoted to Fort Lee's studios — which included, back in the day, Paramount, Fox (later 20th Century Fox), Keystone and Solax, the first and only film studio run by a woman, Alice Guy-Blaché,

But the Barrymore Film Center's main attraction is the theater, which will feature revivals of classic films, foreign films, new works by up-and-coming filmmakers, and a Reel Jersey Film Festival, expected to launch at the same time as the theater. 

"When people ask me, what is your programming going to be, we always say it's going to be like the Film Forum with parking," said Page, who will be programming along with Meyers.

The theater, complete with "retro-futuristic" art deco trimmings, will be equipped to show not only the latest 4K digital films, but also 16, 35 and 70mm analog movies — making it one of the last places left to see celluloid films.

It's also probably the first movie theater designed since the late 1920s, the end of the silent era, to be be built with an orchestra pit and a theater organ.

"We're looking to do a lot of live accompaniment, when we do silent films," Page said.

The center's nonprofit arm is aiming to raise another $8 million, $5 million of which will go for endowment and another $3 million for exhibits and additional operating expenses. It has raised $200,000 so far. But organizers are expecting more, as the excitement builds toward the opening day — when, it is rumored, Drew Barrymore herself may appear.

"She's very aware of her family history, and very proud of what we're doing here," Meyers said.

NORTHJERSEY.com: The Barrymores of Fort Lee: How an acting dynasty took root in the early history of film

John C. Ensslin, Staff Writer

While growing up in the Coytesville neighborhood of Fort Lee in the 1970s, historian Tom Meyers says he often heard a story about how a famous actor helped build the local fire station — and became part of the fabric of the community and the birthplace of the film industry as a result.

Meyers, executive director of the Fort Lee Film Commission, prefaces the story with the phrase “legend has it," which is historian speak for "this is unproven, but the story is just so irresistible." What is known is that Maurice Barrymore — Broadway actor and patriarch of a family of famous actors — lived in Coytesville and was a member of the volunteer Coytesville Fire Department.

Barrymore was fond of sitting in his silk pajamas on the front porch of his Victorian home sharing “adult beverages” with his Broadway actor friends. He also had the fire department’s water pumper in his front yard.

A chimney fire broke out near a barn in the neighborhood one day and so Barrymore and company rushed the pumper to the blaze. The old man who owned the chimney told Barrymore not to worry, he would put out the fire with some salt.

“And Barrymore — very theatrically said, ‘My good man, you can’t put a fire out with salt. Boys, let her rip," Meyers says. “And the plume of water hit the old man’s chimney and destroyed it."

The incident triggered change.

"Maurice felt they didn’t get enough respect because they didn’t have a firehouse and they didn’t have uniforms,” says Meyers.

 Barrymore would get the fire department the respect it deserved.

So how to fund that? A happy coincidence resulted in both a new firehouse and the start of the career of one of the most famous actors of that generation.

Here's what happened: Around this same time as the chimney debacle, Maurice’s son John came to live with his father. John Barrymore — then 18 — carried a sketchpad with him and wanted to be an artist. But Maurice changed that plan. "My boy, the Barrymores are actors,” he says. “You’ll be an actor. If we were plumbers, you’d be a plumber.”

Maurice Barrymore rented a local beer garden, where he decided to staged a play called “Man of the World.” The production would be the acting debut of John Barrymore, who would go on to become one of the most famous actors of his generation (and the grandfather of actor Drew Barrymore).

The proceeds of the event helped build the Coytesville Fire Department. The building still stands and was used as a fire house until the late 1950s, Meyers says. The company also got some very theatrical-looking fire uniforms, one of which is one display at the Fort Lee Museum, where Meyers has his office.

The Barrymores’ time in Fort Lee was  brief but crucial. Maurice moved to Coytesville in 1895. He died 10 years later. But all three of his children, Lionel, Ethel and John, worked as actors in Fort Lee’s early motion picture history. Thus, when plans were announced in December to create a film center in Fort Lee, Meyers says it made sense to name it after John Barrymore and his famous acting family.

“We have this deep connection with the Barrymore family and it’s an amazing one,” Meyers says. “That’s why we see magic in that name and why we want to attach it to the film center.” 

Meyers hopes to invite Drew Barrymore to be part of the dedication of the new building when it opens in 2019. “We know she has a keen grasp of her family’s history,” Meyers says. “So, that’s a direct link for us. She’s a living part of this history.”

NORTHJERSEY.com: Video: Fort Lee Museum

CHRIS MONROE/SPECIAL TO NORTHJERSEY.COM

Tom Meyers, a Fort Lee historian, talks about the Barrymores, a famous family of actors.

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